The world’s largest compilation of passwords to be leaked online has been discovered by a research team at Cybernews, containing 9,948,575,739 unique plaintext entries. The credentials were discovered in a file named “rockyou2024.txt” that was posted on a popular hacking forum on July 4, 2024.
Many of the so-called RockYou2024 passwords have already been leaked in previous data breaches. This is not the first RockYou data dump either, as the name has been associated with a number of large-scale password leaks since 2009.
The user who posted RockYou2024, who has the username “ObamaCare,” has been responsible for multiple data dumps since creating their account in May 2024. They have shared an employee database from law firm Simmons & Simmons, a lead from online casino AskGamblers and student applications for Rowan College at Burlington County in New Jersey.
RockYou is a defunct social application site and, in 2009, more than 32 million of its users’ account details were exposed after a hacker got hold of the plaintext file where they had been stored. In June 2021, another text file was posted named “rockyou2021.txt.” This 100GB file contained 8.4 billion passwords, making it the largest ever password dump at the time.