Tactics to Avoid Password Leaks

Learn how Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication combats data breaches, weak passwords, and phishing attacks.
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Updated: 09/30/2024 - 6:39
Time to read: 12 minutes

Password leaks are a major problem which can expose your personal information to hackers.

Online password checkers can help to secure passwords by letting you know when a password has been compromised. You can then take important steps, including changing all your passwords, to secure your identity and personal information.

The prevalence of leaked passwords

With data breaches and password hacks regularly making the news, you may wonder how to approach password safety for yourself or the organisation you work for.

When hackers gain passwords for email, social media, and even medical or bank accounts, they can steal lots of other vital information and even identities. When an institutional password is stolen, the company is vulnerable to theft, and the other employees are vulnerable to password breaches and identity theft.

So many parts of our lives involve online spaces, which include using passwords in dozens of different websites per day. This amounts to billions of login details, across billions of users worldwide.

Hundreds of websites are subject to hack attacks every year, and the stolen account details are sold on the black market or dark web. Unfortunately, you may not know that you have been hacked. When a company suffers a data breach, they may remain quiet about it for months or forever.

Understanding the history of password breaches

Almost any organisation is vulnerable to data breaches like password leaks since most organisations use digital and online technology to connect workers, users/customers, and information. Technology, retail, medical, financial, and government organisations have all been the victims of cyberattacks like password leaks since at least 2004. In fact, since 2011, nearly 8 billion usernames alone have been leaked.

These major data breaches have led to password leaks:

  • 2011: Sony
  • 2012: LinkedIn, Yahoo, DropBox
  • 2013: Tumblr, Adobe, Evite
  • 2014: Rambler, Dominos
  • 2015: Ashley Madison, Clear Voice Systems, R2Games
  • 2016: Adult Friend Finder, LiveJournal, Youku
  • 2017: River City Media, Edmondo, Zomato, MyHeritage
  • 2018: MyFitnessPal, Houzz, Ticketfly, Shein
  • 2019: VerificationsIO, CafePress, LuminPDF, Canva, Facebook, Zynga, PDL
  • 2020: Minted, Wattpad

In the first six months of 2019 alone, data breaches exposed 4 billion records, usually including email addresses and passwords. These hacks are becoming more frequent, with hackers beginning to aggregate data from major leaks and either exposing passwords or selling them online.

Many people remember the infamous Experian breach in 2017, which exposed social security numbers, physical addresses, and birthdays, making it very easy for identities to be stolen.

2021 saw some of the worst data breaches yet. LinkedIn suffered a breach in April in which hackers said they scraped 500 million profiles and leaked 2 million profiles’ information as proof. Facebook barely reported a hack that affected 530 million of its users in April, and though the scraped information was from 2019, many usernames and passwords could be useful two years later.

Halfway through 2021, one of the worst password leaks in internet history occurred. Called RockYou2021, like