Cybersecurity specialist Jeremiah Fowler discovered a leak of personal data related to 149 million accounts of online services such as social networks and government institutions. About 420,000 affected individuals are clients of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.

The data contains usernames as well as passwords from phones and computers. Compromised data includes 48 million Gmail accounts, 17 million Facebook users, 6.5 million Instagram owners, 4 million Yahoo accounts, 3.4 million Netflix accounts, and 780,000 TikTok accounts. The volume of compromised data reaches 94 gigabytes.

A security specialist clarified that the leak of login-passwords from Binance is not related to a breach of the exchange's internal systems. The data was obtained through the Infostealer program for stealing confidential information - the software discreetly extracts saved logs from compromised devices. Deddy Lavid, CEO of the blockchain security company Cyvers, confirmed: the incident indicates a data leak from users' devices, not a breach of the exchange itself.

A significant amount of exposed data is associated with accounts related to government structures and .gov domains. This poses a risk of phishing attacks, as malicious actors can impersonate government agencies, Fowler said. In a limited sample of records, there are accounts of financial institutions, data on crypto wallets and trading accounts, as well as banking and credit card information.

The Infostealer program disguises itself as cheats or mods for video games like Roblox, and then hacks victims' accounts to steal cryptocurrency or installs crypto miners on their devices, representatives of Kaspersky reported. Created on the Chromium and Gecko engines, the malware targets the most popular browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Yandex, Edge, and Brave.

In August of last year, a database of the Japanese division of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX was discovered online, containing confidential information of more than 35,000 users. In the same year, rumors emerged about a security breach of the Bybit cryptocurrency exchange's security system, but the exchange denied them.