Over 700 million emails have been leaked on to the Internet

After the discovery made by security researcher Troy Hunt that over 700 million emails had been leaked  on to the Internet, cyber security experts from AlienVault and Tripwire were on hand to provide comments.

Paul Norris, senior systems engineer (EMEA) at Tripwire, said: "711 million addresses seem a lot to be discovered. There will be a high number of repeated addresses and fake addresses in the dump. However, these days, it’s almost a given that if you have some form of online presence, social media or online accounts of any sorts, your personal information is going to be harvested and sold on to third parties.

"We are all guilty of not reading the terms and conditions of software agreements or when we register for a new service – quite often there will be a clause in terms of service that is similar to:

If you downloaded the Software, servers will automatically log certain non-personal information from your computer, information such as your IP address. If you decide you wish to register the software, we require that you provide us with certain Personal Information.  That Personal information includes your name, address, computer system profile and may also include other information such as your email address.

may provide aggregate statistics about our customers, traffic patterns, and related site information to reputable third-party vendors.

"So, it’s highly likely your email address will be within this ‘dump’ of addresses, but you shouldn’t be alarmed or surprised. There are so many methods of harvesting personal data. It’s good practise to ensure you have different passwords for different accounts, and these passwords should be passphrases that are not easy to guess."

Chris Doman, security researcher at AlienVault, added: "This looks like a massive database - but it's mostly combined from other older databases. These databases get passed around on various forums, some are many years out of date."