It has NOTHING to do with Apple or Apple users. The gratuitous mention of Cook and Apple is bullsh*t pseudo-journalism to spice it up.
This leak is a huge list of ONLY passwords. No emails, no usernames
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Thank you for the clarification.
However, I’m wondering if this leak is just a huge list of ONLY passwords, how would a hacker be able to merge them with user names and/or email addresses?
They wouldn't be able to do that.
The value of a list of passwords is to feed into a "brute-force" program that tries a bazillion passwords one at a time until it finds one that works.
A list like this narrows down the number of possible combinations a LOT and saves the crackers a lot of time, compared to trying every possible combination of characters and lengths.