In approximately August 2021, hundreds of gigabytes of data produced by Bureau van Dijk (BVD) was obtained and later published to a popular hacking forum. BVD claims to "capture and treat private company information for better decision making and increased efficiency", and the corpus of data released contained hundreds of millions of lines about corporations and individuals, including personal information such as names and dates of birth. The data also included 28M unique email addresses along with physical addresses (presumedly corporate locations), phone numbers and job titles.
This collection 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.