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Massive data breach of 773 million e-mail.

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Certified data analyst/Citizen Developer with a degree in computer science and modest work experience that spans data visualization, data analysis and Power Platform in the technology industry.

Massive data breach of a database containing 772,904,991 unique email addresses and more than 21 million unique passwords were recently posted to an online hacking forum, according to Wired.

The hack was first reported by Troy Hunt of the hack security site Have I Been Pwned, which lets you check whether your email and passwords have been compromised and which sites your information was leaked from.

The data collection as a whole, called “Collection #1,” doesn’t appear to originate from a certain source, but is rather an aggregation of 2,000 leaked databases that include passwords that have been cracked, according to Wired. That’s to say the protective layer that scrambles, or “hashes,” a password to prevent your original password from being visible has been cracked, and the passwords are presented in a usable form on hacking forums.

Data in Collection #1 wasn’t put up for sale, like many data leaks are. It was first hosted on popular cloud hosting site Mega before being taken down, then posted on a public hacking site.

“Collection #1” is among the largest data breaches in history, second only to Yahoo’s hack that affected as many as 3 billion users.

Are you one among this massive data breach To check whether or not your data was affected, you can head over to HaveIBeenPwned.com and enter your email address. Once you hit enter, and if your data was affected, you can scroll down and see whether your data was included in the “Collection #1” leak.

From there, you can head over to the “Passwords” tab on the top of the Have I Been Pwned website and type in any passwords you can remember, especially those that you use across different sites. If it’s been “seen,” it’s time to change the password on sites where you use it, and stop using that password altogether.

When you check if your email has been part of a hack before on the Have I Been Pwned site, you’ll also likely see sites where you have accounts that have suffered a breach in the past. If you haven’t already changed your password on those sites, you should go ahead and change those passwords.

And if you’ve been meaning to use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass, now is the time to sign up for one. Password managers make it easy to generate strong unique passwords for individual sites and accounts. Since the passwords generated by password managers are typically difficult to remember, password managers store your passwords so you can access them whenever you want to log in to a site.

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My name is Gift Ahmed, and I am a citizen developer with extensive experience automating processes in businesses. I also have a strong understanding of data analysis and how it can be applied in various areas of life.