The largest password compilation with nearly ten billion unique passwords was leaked on a popular hacking forum. The Cybernews research team believes the leak poses severe dangers to users prone to reusing passwords.

The king is dead. Long live the king. Cybernews researchers discovered what appears to be the largest password compilation with a staggering 9,948,575,739 unique plaintext passwords. The file with the data, titled rockyou2024.txt, was posted on July 4th by forum user ObamaCare.

The team cross-referenced the passwords included in the RockYou2024 leak with data from Cybernews’ Leaked Password Checker, which revealed that these passwords came from a mix of old and new data breaches.

“In its essence, the RockYou2024 leak is a compilation of real-world passwords used by individuals all over the world. Revealing that many passwords for threat actors substantially heightens the risk of credential stuffing attacks,” researchers said.

Credential stuffing attacks can be severely damaging for users and businesses. For example, a recent wave of attacks targeting Santander, Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts, QuoteWizard, and others was a direct result of credential stuffing attacks against the victims’ cloud service provider, Snowflake.

“Threat actors could exploit the RockYou2024 password compilation to conduct brute-force attacks and gain unauthorized access to various online accounts used by individuals who employ passwords included in the dataset,” the team explained.

How to protect against RockYou2024?

While there is no silver bullet to protect users who had their passwords exposed, impacted individuals and organizations should take up mitigation strategies. The Cybernews research team advises to:

Immediately reset the passwords for all accounts associated with the leaked passwords. It is strongly recommended to select strong, unique passwords that are not reused across multiple platforms

Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible. This enhances security by requiring additional verification beyond a password

Utilize password manager software to securely generate and store complex passwords. Password managers mitigate the risk of password reuse across different accounts

Cybernews will include data from RockYou2024 in the Leaked Password Checker, allowing anyone to check if their credentials were exposed via the latest record-holding exposed password compilation.

With RockYou2024, we witnessed a second record-breaking compilation leaked online in 2024. Earlier this year, Cybernews discovered the Mother of all breaches (MOAB), comprising an astounding 12 terabytes of information, spanning over a mind-boggling 26 billion records.

Bd pratidin English/Lutful Hoque