- Hacker Adkka72424 claims to have leaked 6.8 billion unique email addresses
- Cybernews verified about 3 billion usable emails, file size 150 GB
- Massive leak raises phishing and BEC risks through custom social engineering attacks
A hacker claims to have obtained and leaked 6.8 billion unique email addresses, and while the claims are unverified at this time, initial reports indicate that at least half of those emails are real.
Researchers of cyber news I recently came across a new post on a popular data leak forum created by a hacker with the alias Adkka72424 who claims to have obtained 6.8 billion unique email addresses through different channels, some of which were obtained illegally.
“Two years ago, I obtained more than 3.3 billion unique email addresses. After a long break, I started this again and spent about 2 months extracting emails from various combos, ULP collections, registries and databases and extracted 6,839,584,670 unique email addresses,” the post reads.
At least half is useful
We don’t know if the database is offered for free or for sale, but cyber news It says the file is 150 GB. Analyzing the sample, they said that after removing unusable emails, duplicates and invalid addresses, about three billion could be useful.
This would still rank it among the biggest email breaches of all time and a treasure trove for all hackers involved in phishing and business email compromise.
“According to the comments in the forum thread, most users are excited about using the data to check if other leaks contain new and fresh data, comparing the entries with this version.” cyber news saying.
“This allows threat actors to save time by attempting to exploit only newly found leaked accounts.”
Many criminals, especially those who engage in social engineering, would profile their victims before attacking. They would search for your workplace, position, work hours, salary, and most importantly, contact information. By combining all of this and creating a detailed profile, they can create highly effective, personalized phishing emails that can result in credential leaks and fraudulent bank transfers.
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