Alleged leak of over 6.8B emails downplayed

Cybernews reports that more than 6.8 billion unique email addresses were touted by threat actor Adkka72424 to have been included in a 150 GB database posted on BreachForums in early January.

Adkka72424 claimed that the included email addresses were extracted from ULP collections, databases, logs, and credential combos. While the database was confirmed to contain over 6.8 billion lines of data, Cybernews researchers said that nearly 3 billion of the emails were truly unique, while the remaining addresses were unusable or duplicates.

Despite the significant reduction, such data could still facilitate widespread phishing and malware intrusions, with malicious actors already looking forward to comparing the database with other leaked information.

"This allows threat actors to save time by trying to exploit only newly found leaked accounts," said Cybernews researchers.

Such a development comes just a week after over 8.7 million records, mainly from Chinese individuals, were reported to have been exposed by an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster.