Security researchers and computing blogs are reporting 'the mother of all breaches' in reference to a data breach where billions of records have been breached.  The dataset doesn't come from one single breach but a compilation of multiple data breaches.  
26 billion records comprising 12 terabytes of information are reported to be leaked which include users of LinkedIn, X and Venmo.  It is reported to be the largest ever leak, so it is being referred to as the Mother of All Breaches (MOAB).  Leak-Lookup, a data breach search engine, said it was the holder of the leaked dataset, and reported the problem behind the leak as a firewall misconfiguration.

The leak mostly contains information from past data breaches, but most certainly holds new data, that hasn't previously been published.

Cybernews reports:

The MOAB contains 26 billion records over 3,800 folders, with each folder corresponding to a separate data breach. While this doesn’t mean that the difference between the two automatically translates to previously unpublished data, billions of new records point to a very high probability, the MOAB contains never seen before information.

Researchers believe that the owner of the MOAB has a vested interest in storing large amounts of data and, therefore, could be a malicious actor, data broker, or some service that works with large amounts of data.

“The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts,” the researchers said.

The Cybernews report lists the brands with 100M+ leaked records and can be viewed here: Mother of all breaches reveals 26 billion records.

How to you report your data breaches in your organisation?

All data breaches in an organisation should be reported, whether you are the one that had made the breach or are the recipient of the breach.  Ensure you have a data breach procedure and your staff are trained on how to report one.  Further help and advice is available through our Data Breach Best Practice Area, and our Knowledge Bank where our core DPO team are on hand to provide legal advice on data breaches.