The Mother of All Breaches?

Let's rather say a bunch of breaches in a single box

Yeah, that's what some people are saying: the "Mother of All Breaches" (MOAB). What does that mean? What happened? The security researcher Volodymyr "Bob" Diachenko, in collaboration with the Cybernews team, allegedly, recently discovered a massive data breach with more than 26 billion records. This is more than three times the number of human beings on Earth today. But has this finding been properly named?

Let's start by highlighting what has been discovered in this gargantuan amount of data. Researchers say it is mainly passwords and user data from applications such as LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Wattpad, Evite, Adobe and Weibo, among others. But the first place among all of them goes to Tencent QQ, a Chinese instant messaging software, accounting for about 5.8% of the total "MOAB." This data breach also contains records of government agencies from the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Turkey, and other countries.

What the research team specifically found in an "open instance" was a judiciously organized database with nearly 4,000 folders taking up around 12 terabytes. The thing is that each folder contains records of a separate data breach, many of which had already been reported previously. So, although it was the researchers who apparently dubbed it "MOAB," this finding looks more like a database of multiple data breaches. The team even expressed that it is highly probable that there are duplicates in that database but that there seems to be new user data included anyway. Nonetheless, instead of saying the "mother of all data breaches," I think it is more appropriate to call it "the largest compilation of multiple breaches," as curiously Cybernews later referred to it in its own publication.

To read the full article, go to https://fluidattacks.com/blog/the-mother-of-all-breaches/