Imagine all the past security breaches living under one roof, in one place, all for hackers to visit and gain access to thousands of consumer’s data. A recent discovery unveils a supermassive amount of data from previous breaches spanning over 26 billion records exposing user data from popular platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and MyFitnessPal to name a few.

Also known as, The Mother of All Breaches (MOAB for short).

Cybersecurity researchers worry that having such large amounts of data in one place can be dangerous. According to the team, while the leaked dataset contains mostly information from past data breaches, it almost certainly holds new data, that was not published before.

It’s not a matter of if, however, a matter of when malicious actors decide to use the data to facilitate attacks including but not limited to, identity theft, phishing schemes and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts.

What does this mean for you

Consumer’s can be impacted if they are using the same username and passwords for multiple accounts. Think of MOAB as a data tree- a hacker can stumble upon one account which leads them to another and eventually branches out to even more sensitive accounts that potentially effect not only you, but friends, family and colleagues.

How can you get ahead of this breach

Ramp up your cyber hygiene! We suggest taking a moment to do the following:

1. Use these tools to identify if your data was leaked
   • keepersecurity.com/vault – with an active Keeper account
   • BreachWatch – those without an active Keeper account
     • Don’t have your Keeper account setup yet? Visit our Keeper site to start securely storing credentials in your vault.
   • Experian, Credit Karma and other personal finance platforms offer credit monitoring services when you sign up.
2. Change passwords to impacted accounts
3. Enable multi-factor authentication on all important accounts whether they are impacted or not

Further cyber hygiene practices:

• Use a Password manager such as Keeper to avoid using the same password on multiple sites
• Use strong, hard to guess passwords
• Monitor accounts and look for any suspicious activity
• *Consider freezing your credit. This will prevent anyone from opening new accounts in your name without your permission. You can freeze your credit with each of the three major credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax) by visiting their websites.

Additional Resources

• Get more information on this breach by reading the article from CyberNews, Mother of all breaches reveals 26 billion records: what we know so far
• University of Rochester Data Security Updates and Resources