TECH NEWS – However you count it, 9,948,575,739 passwords is more than the number of people on the planet, which is good because at least not everyone uses just one, but it also makes us think it’s worth changing them sometimes!

RockYou’s latest collection of passwords probably includes the passwords we use, so the biggest cyberattack risk we’ve ever faced is the risk of a breach. The nearly 10 billion figure, by the way, was reported by Cybernews, which posted the updated dataset on a forum used by hackers. The name RockYou was first used by a social media company in 2009, when 32 million users were affected by a breach. In 2023, a 100GB file, RockYou2021, was released, containing 8.5 billion passwords at the time. That’s far more than the 3.2 billion COMB collection in 2022, and now we have RockYou2024, which is just a stone’s throw away from 10 billion! This is no joke, and it’s worth taking seriously.

The biggest danger of password harvesting is that they can brute force which password is ours, because they try a lot of passwords in a short period of time to see if one of them works, so they can steal the victim’s identity and cause significant business damage, and information can be returned to the RockYou data package. A sufficiently sophisticated cloud or hosting service (e.g. Cloudflare) should have a mechanism in place to combat brute force attacks, but if a login appears authentic (correct email address and password), there is little they can do to prevent it.

Obviously, the best step is multi-factor authentication (which is also mandatory for bank logins), so that, for example, an SMS code is sent to log in after entering the correct username/email address and password. And the cell phone is not so easy to steal. By the way, Cybernews has a password verification service so you can check if your password is in RockYou2024.

Source: PCGamer, Cybernews, Cybernews