Home > News

COMB Data Breach Includes 3.2 Billion Email and Password Pairs

By Laura Tucker
Comb Data Breach Featured

You may think you’re untouchable with data breaches and that they’re no big deal – you’ve been worried before, and nothing ever came of it. But the COMB data breach is different. More than 3 billion password and email pairs were affected in the COMB (Compilation of Many Breaches) data breach.

Also read: Browser vs. Third-Party Password Manager: Which Is Best For You?

COMB Data Breach Reach

The most interesting thing about the COMB data breach is that it’s not a new breach. This effort pools user data that was stolen from earlier breaches of services such as LinkedIn and Netflix.

Once you start to realize the full breadth of this new effort, it’s eye-popping. Other breaches included all the users’ data of a site or an app – this one includes users’ data of many services.

Comb Data Breach Linkedin

This is precisely why it’s suggested to not use the same password for multiple sites/services. If you used the same one for perhaps 10 sites/services, and if one of those sites/services were breached, now the cyber thieves have access to all 10 of those accounts.

The COMB data breach may be the biggest-ever collection of stolen user data. Just one of the included breaches involves data stolen from the LinkedIn data breach in 2012 that involved 116 million accounts.

Moving Forward

If you’re now worried that your email and password combination is included in the COMB data breach, you can head to this Cybernews link and input your email.

If your email appears there, it means it and one or more of your passwords is part of this large collection and can be used for phishing attacks and email scams. Undoubtedly, it’s a complete pain to do so, but the recommended action is to change your password on any account that uses that email.

Comb Data Breach Passwords

It’s best at this point to finally use a different password for each one. You can use a third-party password manager, a browser password manager, or a built-in service with your operating system that creates strong, complicated passwords and remembers them. Optionally, you can also use another service like Google, Facebook, or Apple to sign in wherever those options appear.

Remember: there’s nothing you can do to remove your info from the COMB data breach or any other attack, so it’s best to just make sure you don’t land there to begin with.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.