Even if you are meticulous online, a data breach can expose personal and financial information. Sometimes, however, hackers compile credentials and information from previous breaches and make them readily available for attacks.

As reported by Cybernews, this is exactly what happened with the new, super-sized Mother of all Breaches (MOAB), which retrieved from a past leak, breach, and hacked database 26 billion records, or 13 terabytes of data included. In a recent investigation conducted with cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko, this news outlet discovered all these records on publicly available instances.

While the owners of these stolen data may never be identified, cyber news security researchers believe it could be hackers, data brokers, or other services that handle large amounts of data.

Even if this MOAB does not appear to consist of new data, it could still be compromised online as a result. Here's what you need to know about this new data breach and how to find out if you are affected.

We examined all of this leaked data and found that many of the records contained in it were stolen in previous breaches. The companies whose data was leaked the most include:

In addition to data from all of the companies listed above, the breach also included records from government agencies in the United States, Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Turkey, and several other countries.

Even though much of this data is outdated, according to the security researchers who discovered it, it can be exploited in a variety of ways online, including identity theft, phishing attacks, targeted cyber attacks, and unauthorized access to users' personal and confidential accounts.

The biggest threat, however, is password reuse. Reusing the same password across multiple sites and services allows hackers to obtain credentials for one account and use them to access other accounts. Therefore, you should use strong, complex, and unique passwords for all your online accounts. You can come up with your own passwords, but the best password managers can do this for you and store all your passwords securely in one place.

We have seen multiple compilations of breaches (COMBs) before, but this may be the largest ever recorded. For example, in 2021 Cybernews reported on one involving 3.2 billion records. This MOAB, however, contains 26 billion records all in one place, and even worse, the entire list is searchable.

If you want to see if your personal or financial information has been leaked online as a result of this data breach, Cybernews has created its own data breach checker to make it easy. Similarly, the popular data leak site HaveIBeenPwned will probably make these records immediately searchable.

While the risk of falling victim to an attack using these records is low since most of the data in this leak is old, one should still be wary of suspicious activity. This means we need to be more cautious when checking our inboxes to avoid phishing scams and when checking our online accounts for signs of fraud or anything unnatural.

While the best antivirus software can help keep you safe from malware and other attacks, there is not much you can do if a data breach or leak exposes your personal or financial data. Instead, that's where the best identity theft protection services come in, helping you recover stolen identities and money lost to fraud.

With more data being created every day than ever before, large-scale data breaches like this one are likely to become more common. However, if you are careful online and use strong, complex passwords for each of your accounts, you are much less likely to be a victim of cybercrime.