The facts

The “breach” is more like a collection of other breaches collected over time, many of which were already publicized separately (hence the name “Collection 1”). This is simply the first time that such a huge collection of compromised data was found being sold all in one place (check out the biggest breaches of 2018 here).

However, the collection contains roughly 140,000,000 email addresses that Hunt and his team at Haveibeenpwned.com have never seen before (read his report here). It is possible that this data has been bouncing around the dark web for some time as the product of other smaller breaches.

The scope of the data is really far more shocking than “just” 770 million people’s data, which is already a staggering number. According to Hunt, it includes “1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords” and “21,222,975 unique passwords.”