Someone has posted the largest collection of leaked passwords on a prominent hacker forum. This collection contains 8.4 billion passwords and the txt file is 100GB in size. The collection was dubbed RockYou2021 by the user.
The person who posted this list claims that all passwords in this list are between 6 and 20 characters long. The collection is large becuase it includes passwords leaked from differnet data breaches in the past.
The reporter from Cybernews did his own testing and found only 8,459,060,239 unique entries. It is almost ten times lower than it was claimed. As the report talks about unique entries, it seems the original file has several passwords repeated multiple times in the list.
The name ‘RockYou2021’ could have been taken from the infamous RockYou data breach of 2009. RockYou was a company that developed widgets for MySpace. The company’s server was hacked in 2009 and the hack leaked over 32 million user accounts. RockYou was storing user account data in plain text in the database.
These data leaks are the reason why I recommend users keep checking if they have been affected by any of the data breaches.
Also see: Check if your account data was leaked in a data breach
If any of your account was affected by a data breach, you should change its password. I also recommend never to reuse any of your password. Always use a good password generator to create a strong and unique password.
Also see: Best Password managers
