I tried tracking it down and from all I can tell, all these articles in the past few days are just shoddy rereporting of people talking about the "MOAB" dump which was widely reported when it came out in January. I haven't found any substantiative claims on anything new since then.
The referenced "Forbes report" which pops up everywhere says:
> According to Vilius Petkauskas at Cybernews, whose researchers have been investigating the leakage since the start of the year, “30 exposed datasets containing from tens of millions to over 3.5 billion records each,” have been discovered. In total, Petkauskas has confirmed, the number of compromised records has now hit 16 billion.
It really looks like the Forbes writer is shooting from the hip and mixing things up and all these other sites just running with it. Then the LLMs feed on that. A good study of the hyper-real news cycle at play I guess.
ockham' razor principle - we have to assume that this is not an actual leak or is a hoax, otherwise we sure have heared something about it the last days
al_borland · 3h ago
This article doesn't have any useful information. It just serves to make people scared. I don't know what to do with this information.
It didn't even say users should change their passwords, just use a password manager. I question if various password managers were hacked to have passwords across all these services. Especially with the mention of the URL, login, password format. The big question is which one, as those are the users who need to worry... and also find a new password manager.
pjaoko · 4h ago
16 billion passwords from Apple, Facebook, Google and more leaked. Why has no one heard of it?
baobun · 4h ago
Looks like we did hear about it back in January and March.
https://se.security.ntt/en/moab-data-leak-exposes-global-vul...
The referenced "Forbes report" which pops up everywhere says:
> According to Vilius Petkauskas at Cybernews, whose researchers have been investigating the leakage since the start of the year, “30 exposed datasets containing from tens of millions to over 3.5 billion records each,” have been discovered. In total, Petkauskas has confirmed, the number of compromised records has now hit 16 billion.
It really looks like the Forbes writer is shooting from the hip and mixing things up and all these other sites just running with it. Then the LLMs feed on that. A good study of the hyper-real news cycle at play I guess.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/06/19/16-billi...
It didn't even say users should change their passwords, just use a password manager. I question if various password managers were hacked to have passwords across all these services. Especially with the mention of the URL, login, password format. The big question is which one, as those are the users who need to worry... and also find a new password manager.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44322961