Wired: “When hackers breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years—stealing 71 million and 117 million passwords, respectively—they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more into a gargantuan, unprecedented collection of 2.2 billion unique usernames and associated passwords and is freely distributing them on hacker forums and torrents, throwing out the private data of a significant fraction of humanity like last year’s phone book…”

• See the Hasso Plattner Institut – Everyday personal data is stolen in criminal cyber attacks. A large part of the stolen information is subsequently made public on Internet databases, where it serves as the starting point for other illegal activities. With the HPI Identity Leak Checker, it is possible to check whether your email address, along with other personal data (e.g. telephone number, date of birth or address), has been made public on the Internet where it can be misused for malicious purposes.