A spambot called 'Onliner' has recently leaked the e-mails & passwords of over 771 million people onto a server thought to be located in the Netherlands.
The bot is designed to spread malware including the Ursnif banking trojan virus, which is designed to steal the login details of people's online bank accounts.
Anyone whose email address has been leaked is likely to be hit by a barrage of spam. Your e-mail address could also be taken over and turned into a spam factory or used to circulate dangerous malware.
Troy Hunt, who owns the website HaveIBeenPwned, which lets users know if they have been hacked, said the breach was "the largest single set of data I’ve ever loaded into HIBP".
Hunt explained the magnitude of the hack & admitted that he himself was a victim of mega leak;
Just for a sense of scale, that’s almost one address for every single man, woman and child in all of Europe,
The first place to start is with an uncomfortable truth: my email address is in there. Twice.
Troy's account of the incident can be seen on his blog post.
Troy today tweeted out an image which suggests that there might be a lot of Irish affected by the leak.
Have I upset the Irish? pic.twitter.com/qe5Hodlync
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) August 31, 2017
Visit Troy's website to check if your online accounts have been compromised.