The Interior Ministry denied reports of a large-scale leak of 16 billion passwords.

Information about the massive leak of 16 billion passwords distributed online is invalid. This was announced on June 20 by the Department for the Organization of the fight against the illegal use of information and communication technologies (UBK) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

"This is not a new large-scale leak. The detected data is a large archive (compilation) collected over many years by various malicious programs," the department's Telegram channel says.

It is noted that the archive in question contains duplicate information, as well as outdated data and passwords that were previously compromised.

"This is not the result of a single recent hacking of some gigantic storage facility," the Interior Ministry added.

Key Decoupling: Hackers have intensified password-matching attacks

Most of the criminals worked from the USA, China and Russia.

Forbes magazine reported on June 19 on the alleged large-scale leak of 16 billion passwords from Apple, Google, and Facebook accounts (owned by Meta, whose activities are recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation). Then it was clarified that passwords from the Telegram messenger, VPN services and government platforms also "leaked" to the Network.