Criminals stole five billion personal records from Facebook, other sites in Q1 2021

The numbers have been attributed to the Compilation of Many Breaches (COMB) which is considered as one of the biggest data breaches of all time.

HILLARY ESSIEN • April 27, 2021

A hacker on a computer used to illustrate the story.

Atlas VPN, a data analysis company, has revealed that over five billion data records have leaked in the first quarter of 2021.

In February alone, Altas VPN recorded 12 breaches, with a record of 3.4 billion personal records being compromised.

The numbers have been attributed to the Compilation of Many Breaches (COMB) which is considered as one of the biggest data breaches of all time exposing 3.27 billion personal records. COMB is made up of emails and password combinations that have already been leaked in the past.

Facebook suffered the second-biggest breach this year, where a total of 533 million users were affected, making up about one-fifth of the social network’s user database.

Other reported breaches include Raychat, an Iranian business and social messenger platform with 267 million records exposed. It included emails, passwords and encrypted chats.

Serasa was also breached, leaving 220 million user records exposed, and Chinese citizens were put at risk when 200 million records were put up for sale on the Dark Web.

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