Collection with 773 million email addresses was publicly online

A collection of 773 million email addresses and 21 million unique passwords has been publicly available online. So says the founder of Have I Been Pwned, who has added the collection to his site.

The collection was on web storage Mega and a link was found on a popular forum, Troy Hunt reports. The collection is now offline and it is unknown to which forum it refers. The information comes from many different sources and has therefore been given the name Collection #1.

In total, the collection contained nearly three billion records, but many of them were not unique. After cleaning, 772,904,991 unique email addresses remained.

In all cases, it seems to hack that are at least three years old, so the passwords are often old passwords. As usual, Hunt recommends using a password manager, regularly renewing passwords, and using two-factor authentication whenever possible.