Welcome To MOAB (Mother Of All Breaches) - A Data Leak Spanning 12TB And 26 Billion Records!

Recently, we reported about cybercriminals striking a range of businesses and organizations, including VF Corporation (the owner of apparel and fashion brands like Vans, North Face, Timberland, Dickies and more), loanDepot and Carnegie Mellon University.

This data breach affected 35.5 million customers, 16.6 million customers and 7,343 individuals respectively, just over 52 million affected individuals.

Now, we bring you news about a data leak that’s being dubbed the “Mother of all Breaches” or MOAB for short.

So, what’s it all about and why is it being touted as one of the biggest data breaches if not the biggest ever? Let’s explore!
 

What Was The MOAB Leak About?

 

• The Mother of all Breaches or MOAB comprises data from numerous previous breaches, reaches a total of 12TB (terabytes) of information and includes 26 billion records in over 3,800 folders.

• Discovered by Bob Diachenko (a cyber security researcher and owner of SecurityDiscovery.com) and a team from Cybernews, billions of exposed records were found on “an open instance whose owner is unlikely ever to be identified.”

• This includes data acquired from platforms such as Tencent, which tops the list at 1.4 billion records leaked, followed by millions of records from Weibo (504), MySpace (360), Twitter (281), Deezer (258), LinkedIn (251), AdultFriendFinder (220), Adobe (153), Canva (143), VK (VKontakte, a Russian online social media and social networking service) (101), Daily Motion (86), Dropbox (69), Telegram (41) and more.

• Furthermore, the leak includes records of various government organizations in the US, Brazil, Germany, Philippines, Turkey and others.

• While the research team says most of the data is from previous breaches, it certainly does contain new data, which was not published before. Essentially, the MOAB might be a COMB (Compilation Of Multiple Breaches).

• According to Cybernews’ data leak checker, the team is aware of information collected from 2,500 data breaches with 15 billion records.

• The researchers believe that the owner of the data could be a malicious actor, data broker or a service that uses and works with large amounts of data.

• Additionally, the team believes the consumer impact could be unprecedented as many people reuse usernames and passwords.

 

What Did The Researchers Say?

 

• Speaking about their findings, the researchers said, “The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts.” 

• Speaking about how individuals using the same password across platforms can be affected, the researchers said, “If users use the same passwords for their Netflix account as they do for their Gmail account, attackers can use this to pivot towards other, more sensitive accounts. Apart from that, users whose data has been included in supermassive MOAB may become victims of spear-phishing attacks or receive high levels of spam emails.”

Do you think that the platforms from which data was leaked should be held to stricter standards? What can businesses do to enhance their cybersecurity outlook?

Let us know in the comments below!