this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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I doubt it. Probably just means some website i signed up to using that email was compromised and had all their data leaked.
The blog post regarding this "dump" suggests that it was actually from malware, so the answer to "Does that mean malware was once on your system?" is likely to be Yes. https://www.troyhunt.com/processing-23-billion-rows-of-alien-txtbase-stealer-logs/
my email has been in several breaches, for example trillian chat that i have never even heard of, and some virtual keyboard i definitely have not installed.....should i suspect malware?
Likely perhaps, but this email address hasn't been actively used by me in over a decade, which means either this dataset is extremely old, or maybe the holders of the data had been compromised by malware when they were attempting to gain access to whatever website. Who knows?
And since it was a singular address, and none of my other addresses were affected, im able to determine the timeline of when I was affected by this. Its during an era where this email address was involved with many data breaches.
There are 23 billion records in this stealer log, with only 284 million unique entries.
For stealerlogs yes, it means malware was on your system, and exfiltrated data, typically from your browsers.