Are you affected by the biggest password leak in history? Here's how to check

Bear in mind that it doesn't necessarily take long for hackers to test a list featuring an innumerable number of passwords, in its entirety. — Relaxnews

More than eight billion passwords in a 100 Gigabyte text file – that's a leak which, in the wrong hands, could do considerable damage. In fact, using techniques like "brute force" and "dictionary attack," hackers can test a considerable number of passwords in a flash to crack web users' secret passcodes.

It's the biggest password leak in the history of the internet. About 8.4 billion confidential passwords have been made available in a 100 Gigabyte text file named "RockYou2021". All of this data comes from old leaks and new discoveries by hackers. While a claim has been made that a list contains 82 billion passwords, the CyberNews site only counts 8,459,060,239 unique entries in the text file.

The name RockYou may ring a bell. Indeed, in 2009, an application called RockYou was attacked by a group of hackers, allowing them to recover 32 million user passwords. And, at the time, RockYou stored this information in a simple plain text file, allowing anyone to read and understand it instantly.