Cybersecurity researchers discover dataset with 26 billion leaked records

Cybersecurity researcher Bob Dyachenko and Cybernews have discovered a dataset containing 26 billion leaked records. The database is made up of data from multiple cyber breaches and is not just made up of recently stolen data.

Cybernews reports that the majority of the stolen data comes from the Chinese tech giant Tencent. This concerns 1.5 billion records. The Chinese social medium Weibo has more than 500 million records and the social medium MySpace has 360 million. These companies are followed by the social medium X, with 281 million records. The company was previously known as Twitter.

Other well-known companies on the list include NetEase, Deezer, LinkedIn, Zynga, Adobe, MyFitnessPal, Canva, JD.com and Badoo. In addition, the leaked database also contains data from government organizations from, among others, the United States, Germany and Turkey. The complete list of websites from the discovered dataset can be viewed on the Cybernews site.

In total, this concerns more than 12TB of data, including passwords and usernames. According to Cybernews, the leaked dataset is of ‘unprecedented proportions’. For comparison, the site reported in 2021 a comb, or combination of many breaches, containing 3.2 billion records. Cybernews then spoke of ‘the biggest breach of all time’.