Zacks data breach

What happened

In December 2022, the investment research company Zacks announced a data breach. The following month, reports emerged of the incident impacting 820k customers. However, in June 2023, a corpus of data with almost 9M Zacks customers appeared before being broadly circulated on a popular hacking forum. The most recent data was dated May 2020 and included names, usernames, email and physical addresses, phone numbers and passwords stored as unsalted SHA-256 hashes. On disclosure of the larger breach, Zacks advised that in addition to their original report "the unauthorised third parties also gained access to encrypted [sic] passwords of zacks.com customers, but only in the encrypted [sic] format".

What data leaked

• Email addresses
• Names
• Passwords
• Phone numbers
• Physical addresses
• Usernames

What to do if you had an account

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Watch for scam calls and SIM swaps. Be suspicious of calls and texts that claim to be from your bank or a courier. Ask your mobile operator for a port-out or SIM-change PIN if it offers one.

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.