Nearly 77 cr email IDs have been exposed! Here's what you can do to be safe

The largest set of breached data has been found, comprising over 77 crore email addresses and passwords posted on to a popular hacking forum last year in December. Security researcher and administrator of 'Have I Been Pwned', Troy Hunt, discovered the data dump of 87GBs and called it 'Collection #1'. Hunt said that the collection was "made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources". He added that the data breach doesn't represent a single hack of a large service and has multiple sources.

Collection #1 was uploaded to cloud service MEGA. It has a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. In total, there are over 116 crore unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. Here, the passwords were treated as case sensitive but not the email addresses. The unique email addresses that have been compromised are over 77.2 crore and there are over 21 crore unique passwords that have also been compromised.