The Biggest Data Breach of All Time: 773 Million Email Addresses And 21 Million Passwords Exposed

Post Credit: Vishal Mathur | @vishalmathur85

It may be time to change all your passwords. If you thought Facebook leaking your data to a third party was bad, wait till you hear this. As many as 772,904,991 unique email addresses and over 21 million unique passwords have been leaked online. This specific data dump, called "Collection #1," is an aggregation of multiple leaked databases that include passwords that have been cracked and holds within itself 2.7 billion records.

The data set was first reported by security researcher Troy Hunt, who runs the Have I Been Pwned website. This website lets you confirm if your email address or password have been compromised by a breach at any point in time. Hunt, in a blog post, confirms, “the unique email addresses totalled 772,904,991 and there are 21,222,975 unique passwords.” 

Collection #1 is over 87GB worth of data and contains over 12,000 separate files. As it turns out, this data leak was posted on the cloud-based sharing website, Mega. Hunt refers to Mega as a “hacking forum” and clarifies that this data seems to have been taken down since.

The way logins on most websites work are that these websites themselves don't store your password. However, what they instead store is a "hash" of your password, which emerges after a complex mathematical calculation that spits out a long string of numbers and letters instead. The next time you log in using the same credentials on the website, and type in the password, the authentication process runs the password through the same calculations, and if the created hash matches the original one, you are allowed to access your account. The latest breach clearly suggests that these hashes, let us say a protective layer for your passwords, has been safely cracked. The hackers have collected and presented your passwords in plain text form in this Collection #1 dump.

Now, how do you find if your email has been impacted?

Hunt has loaded the data into HaveIhaveBeenPwned.com What you need to do is head to this website, and type in your email address to know if your account has been compromised, and if yes, how many previous breaches it has been a part of. The additional data also tells you exactly how much of your data was revealed in each of the breaches—email address, password, user name, IP addresses, geographic location, government-issued ID documents, phone number, physical address and more.

Secondly, you can head to HaveIhaveBeenPwned.com’s companion platform called Pwned Passwords, and type in any password combination that you use to see if that particular combination has ever been leaked in any of the previous data breaches.

The sheer scale and size of Collection #1 and what it reveals is huge. This is one of the largest data breaches in the history of the world wide web, if not the biggest. It is worrying to note that this entire collection was available in the public domain, on the world wide web, for a significant period of time. Till Mega took it down, that is. 

Google Pixel 3 Lite leaked video review shows off plastic body, 3.5mm headphone jack

Credit - Andro News

Google is reportedly working on Pixel 3 Lite and Pixel 3 XL Lite smartphones that are due to launch in spring this year. We have already seen the leaked renders and live photos of the smartphones in the past. Now, a video review of the pre-production version of Pixel 3 Lite has surfaced online giving us the best look at the smartphone design and its specifications.

This time around, the video comes from a Ukrainian tech blog Andro News. One of the most exciting details shown in the video is the inclusion of the 3.5mm audio jack, something that will surely cheer up a lot of people. Google dropped the 3.5mm audio jack on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3-series smartphones for USB Type-C port.

While there have been dongles for Type-C to 3.5mm jack, not all of them work with the Pixel-phones, and you will need one certified by Google. The presence of the audio port on the Pixel 3 Lite-series means you can use your existing 3.5mm jack earphones to listen to your favorite music.

  

The video also shows off the smartphone design where the back is made from plastic, instead of glass and metal, as seen on the Pixel 3. This is understandable considering the product placement of the “Lite” series. Based on the leaked information, the smartphone will sport a 5.56-inch full HD+ display running at a resolution of 1080x2160pixels, 18:9 aspect ratio, and it won’t feature any notch. Other specifications of the smartphone include a Snapdragon 670 SoC, Adreno 615 GPU, 4GB of RAM and 32GB storage.

Camera has been the highlight of Pixel smartphones, and the Pixel 3 Lite will likely be no exception. The reviewer stated that the smartphone takes “high-quality” shots using a single 12.2-megapixel rear camera with f/1.8 aperture. Up front, there is a single selfie snapper of 8-megapixel resolution, so unlike Pixel 3-series, you don’t get a secondary wide-angle selfie snapper.

Running Android Pie, the Reviewer also said that the 2,915mAh battery offers impressive backup. As of now, there is no word on when the Pixel 3 Lite, and the Pixel 3 XL Lite launch date, but the video reviewer believes it could be sometime after Google I/0 2019.

Redmi’s first smartphone this year, the Redmi Note 7 turned out to be great — not like the Redmi Note 6 Pro and the Redmi 6 which were lacklustre. I mean, these two phones were not bad, they were not Xiaomi good either.

See what I did there? Xiaomi has become equivalent to value and affordability. But that’s not necessarily a good thing for the recently listed company.

The decision to split Redmi from the Xiaomi family was not just for the budget focused brand. Xiaomi’s flagship brand, ‘Mi’ should eventually benefit more from this decision. So, despite the spotlight being around Redmi going independent, I think we should see the real picture here, which is ‘Mi’ getting its own niche market.

Redmi’s the Real Hero!

Xiaomi has always been popular for its budget smartphones. Heck, if you are out to buy a budget phone, chances are, you have shortlisted a bunch of Redmi phones. Indeed it was Redmi phones that drove the company’s growth to a considerable extent all these years. So it wasn’t surprising to see analysts mentioning Redmi smartphone models that helped the Beijing-based company become the fourth largest smartphone maker in the world. But the same reports often failed to mention its flagship models.

A report from Kantar World Panel reveals that Xiaomi Mi 8 was the most popular smartphone in China in Q3 2018. So, it’s clear that the company is making efforts to fix this problem. Getting its flagship smartphones to sell well is most likely a priority for the company right now. After all, high-end smartphones command better margins, unlike budget phones. And it’s not just about margins. High-end users are likely to spend more on services, boosting overall revenue.

But with Redmi and Xiaomi walking the same road, it was always going to be difficult.

What do you think? 

Five Ways Not to Get Stuck at PowerPoint

It's hard enough standing in front of a crowd delivering a presentation. To ease the worry, here are five mistakes that are easily avoidable when creating PowerPoint presentation.

It's easy to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations, but designer Jesse Desjardins suggests that more often than not, the speaker's to blame, not the tool. In Desjardins' presentation (embedded above), he outlines five common presentation design mistakes that can be easily avoided, along with suggestions on how you might do so.

While it's important to build your presentation so your audience isn't stuck reading bullet point after bullet point, and instead are open to larger graphics that can be seen from even the farthest rows back, it really comes down to preparation. In the end, it's all about preparation. In fact, Desjardins suggests:

An outstanding 1-hour presentation takes 30 hours or more of prep time.

That may seem extreme, and for most of us it is (you won't always have time to make anoutstanding presentation), but it does underscore that a good presentation requires a lot of time.