Data breach
mail.ru Dump data breach
16,630,988 accounts · breached September 10, 2014
Have I Been Pwned marks this breach as unverified: the data could not be confirmed as coming from the named service, although it contains real email addresses.
What happened
In September 2014, several large dumps of user accounts appeared on the Russian Bitcoin Security Forum including one with nearly 5M email addresses and passwords, predominantly on the mail.ru domain. Whilst unlikely to be the result of a direct attack against mail.ru, the credentials were confirmed by many as legitimate for other services they had subscribed to. Further data allegedly valid for mail.ru and containing email addresses and plain text passwords was added in January 2018 bringing to total to more than 16M records. The incident was also then flagged as "unverified", a concept that was introduced after the initial data load in 2014.
What data leaked
- Email addresses
- Passwords
What to do if you had an account
- Change the password. Change your password on this service. If you used the same password anywhere else, change it there too: attackers try leaked email and password pairs on other sites automatically. A password manager makes one unique password per site practical.
- Turn on two-step sign-in. Enable two-factor authentication where the service offers it, preferably with an authenticator app or a passkey. A leaked password alone is then not enough to get in.
- Expect targeted phishing. Leaked contact details are used to write convincing fake messages that mention the breached company or your real name. Do not click links in unexpected emails or texts about this account; go to the site by typing its address.
Check your email at haveibeenpwned.com
We do not run email lookups ourselves. The search is done on haveibeenpwned.com, the service this list comes from.