1.4B stolen passwords are free for the taking: What we know now

More than a billion plaintext passwords from third-party data breaches are freely available on the internet, and the human tendency to reuse passwords across multiple services means these credentials, some of them years old, remain a serious threat, especially for smaller organizations.

For years password dumps have been traded on criminal forums, but in the last six months the sheer volume of passwords has driven the price down, to the point that, in 2017, someone dumped a collection of 1.4 billion previously exposed credentials online — for free.