A user of a popular data leak forum posted a database, claiming it contains 6.8 billion unique email addresses collected from various data sources online. The user claims to have spent several months digging through various online sources, containing often illegally obtained data.
“Two years ago, I obtained more than 3.3 billion unique email addresses. After a long break, I started this again and spent about 2 months extracting emails from various combos, ULP collections, logs, and databases and extracted 6,839,584,670 unique email addresses,” the post’s author, going by the moniker Adkka72424, said.
The Cybernews research team investigated the 150GB-strong dataset and here’s what they found:
- The dataset did include over 6.8 billion lines of information, exactly as the posts’ author said.
- However, our team noted numerous invalid email addresses, which makes the database a lot more difficult to use for amateur attackers. For one, the database requires time and effort to fix and make usable for large scale attacks.
- The team believes that after eliminating unusable emails and removing duplicates the actual number of email addresses included in the database could be significantly smaller, hovering 3 billion unique emails.
While over twice as small as initially intended, several billion email addresses in a single database is still a massive number of ready-to-use targets for cybercriminals.
For more information, here’s the full report: https://cybernews.com/security/massive-email-database-leak-billions-records/
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This entry was posted on February 11, 2026 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Cybernews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Hacker reveals 6.8 billion emails online and warns victims “your data is public”
A user of a popular data leak forum posted a database, claiming it contains 6.8 billion unique email addresses collected from various data sources online. The user claims to have spent several months digging through various online sources, containing often illegally obtained data.
“Two years ago, I obtained more than 3.3 billion unique email addresses. After a long break, I started this again and spent about 2 months extracting emails from various combos, ULP collections, logs, and databases and extracted 6,839,584,670 unique email addresses,” the post’s author, going by the moniker Adkka72424, said.
The Cybernews research team investigated the 150GB-strong dataset and here’s what they found:
While over twice as small as initially intended, several billion email addresses in a single database is still a massive number of ready-to-use targets for cybercriminals.
For more information, here’s the full report: https://cybernews.com/security/massive-email-database-leak-billions-records/
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This entry was posted on February 11, 2026 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Cybernews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.