The Collection #2 data breach is part of a larger series of data dumps, including Collections #1 through #5, which compiled email addresses and passwords from thousands of sources, from previously known data breaches and some new alleged breaches. Collection #1 alone contained about 2.7 billion records, including 1.2 billion unique email and password combinations, 773 million unique email addresses, and 21 million unique plaintext passwords. Additional collections, named Collections #2 through #5, along with "AP MYR&ZABUGOR #2" and "ANTIPUBLIC #1," were also discovered, significantly adding to the scope of compromised data.
On Tuesday, February 2, it was leaked on a popular hacking forum. It contains billions of user credentials from past leaks from Netflix, LinkedIn, Exploit.in, Bitcoin and more. This leak is comparable to the Breach Compilation of 2017, in which 1.4 billion credentials were leaked.
April 8th, 2024, a Threat Actor operating under the moniker "USDoD" placed a large database up for sale on Breached titled: "National Public Data". They claimed it contained 2,900,000,000 records on United States citizens
In December 2016, a huge list of email address and password pairs appeared in a "combo list" referred to as "Anti Public". The list contained 458 million unique email addresses, many with multiple different passwords hacked from various online systems. The list was broadly circulated and used for "credential stuffing", that is attackers employ it in an attempt to identify other online systems where the account owner had reused their password.
In August 2024, Tencent experienced a major data breach that exposed the personal data of 1.4 billion user accounts. This breach was orchestrated by a hacker known as "Fenice," and the compromised data included sensitive information such as email addresses, phone numbers, and QQ IDs.