More and more of our personal data seems to leak online with each passing day, and while it’s easy to become numb to that reality, some data breaches are more concerning than others. To that point, the discovery of a publicly exposed database by cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler of Website Planet this week is one that everyone should be paying attention to. Fowler went as far as calling it “a dream come true for cyber criminals.”
On Thursday, Fowler reported that he had found a non-password-protected database featuring 184,162,718 unique logins and passwords, which amounted to over 47GB of data. The files he saw included emails, usernames, passwords, and more for a wide range of services and apps, including Microsoft, Meta, Snapchat, and Roblox.
Even more worrying, Fowler spotted logins and credentials for bank accounts, health platforms, and government portals from multiple governments around the world.
Fowler couldn’t verify the identity of the database’s owner, so he sent a responsible disclosure notice to the hosting provider. Shortly after sending the notice, he discovered that the database had been restricted from public access.
Whether or not the database was being used for a legitimate purpose, such as research, or for criminal activity remains a mystery, because the hosting provider won’t share any details about the owner. It also isn’t clear how long the data was exposed to the public.
Fowler verified the authenticity of the data by contacting several email addresses listed in the database. Some responded, confirming that the leaked data was theirs. Fowler suspects that the data was initially gathered by “some type of infostealer malware.”
“Many people unknowingly treat their email accounts like free cloud storage and keep years’ worth of sensitive documents, such as tax forms, medical records, contracts, and passwords without considering how sensitive they are,” Fowler noted, warning users to regularly delete old emails containing sensitive data. “This could create serious security and privacy risks if criminals were to gain access to thousands or even millions of email accounts.”
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184 million logins exposed in ‘dream come true for cyber criminals’ originally appeared on BGR.com on Thu, 22 May 2025 at 14:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.