Mainstream media’s malfeasance is well-documented and usually pertains to their leftist political bias. But a recent huge hack of passwords and subsequent dump of those passwords online has been given limited coverage. This is both inexplicable and inexcusable.

First and foremost, you can check to see if your passwords were hacked and posted online. Check your email addresses here and check your passwords here. While these aren’t foolproof ways to know if you’ve been hacked, it’s wise to see if your information is out there for anyone to see.

Here’s the story from BGR that broke yesterday, but isn’t getting the level of press coverage it deserves:

Shortly before Apple CEO Tim Cook took the virtual stage at the iPhone maker’s Apple Park headquarters campus for WWDC 2021 on Monday — at which the company unveiled a ton of new software updates, including some major new privacy enhancements — an email landed in my inbox underscoring how critical those privacy features are going to be once they roll out with iOS 15. Basically, there’s been another huge data leak, this time exposing several billion passwords in what just might be the biggest dump of passwords online ever.

This news comes via the team at CyberNews, which reports that a 100GB text file containing a staggering 8.4 billion password entries was just leaked on a popular hacker forum. This data set presumably combines passwords stolen via previous data breaches and leaks, and it’s been dubbed the “RockYou2020” password leak on that hacker forum. That name was apparently chosen, per CyberNews, as a nod to the RockYou data breach from back in 2009, “when threat actors hacked their way into the social app website’s servers and got their hands on more than 32 million user passwords stored in plain text.”

If you’re reading these words, suffice it to say you probably need to change your passwords. Today, even. That’s because this new password leak is comparable in scale to the so-called “Compilation of Many Breaches,” or COMB, that we wrote about earlier this year. That previous compilation was essentially a giant database of more than 3.2 billion email-and-password pairings based on existing data that had been stolen as part of previous breaches and leaks from companies like Netflix and LinkedIn.

This is why it’s good to do three things regarding your passwords. First, make them difficult to hack. While that will not protect your from data breaches like these, it will help against brute force attacks. Second, change your passwords often. This can be a major pain considering how digital many Americans are, but it’s good to refresh your passwords about once every month or two. Last but not least, do not use the same password for everything. I have a good password I use for unimportant things and a variable password I use for important things like bank accounts and emails. The “variable” I use is a series of three letters/numbers added to a very strong password that is different for every account. That way, if they get into one account, they can’t use the same password on any of my other important accounts.

This is the biggest public data dump of passwords in history. Meanwhile, mainstream media is busy running cover for Kamala Harris and pressuring Joe Manchin to break his oath to the Constitution.

Image by Dr StClaire from Pixabay