Beautiful People data breach

Breach date: 2015-11-11. Added to this index: 2016-04-25. Accounts affected: about 1.1M. Domain: beautifulpeople.com.

What happened

In November 2015, the dating website Beautiful People was hacked and over 1.1M accounts were leaked. The data was being traded in underground circles and included a huge amount of personal information related to dating.

Breach data sourced from Have I Been Pwned, used under CC BY 4.0. Additional breach metadata provided by XposedOrNot. DataExposed is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.

What was exposed

  • Beauty ratings: An internal score a dating or social platform assigned to how attractive other users found your profile, usually derived from swipes, votes or engagement.
  • Car ownership statuses: A marketing or finance field showing whether you own, lease or finance a vehicle, sometimes with the make, model and year.
  • Dates of birth: Your full birth date, day, month and year, collected at signup for age checks, identity verification, insurance quotes, birthday offers or government services.
  • Drinking habits: Answers about alcohol use, such as never, socially or regularly, stored by dating apps, health and fitness apps, insurer questionnaires, surveys, and sometimes treatment or recovery services.
  • Education levels: Your highest qualification, such as high school, a trade certificate, a bachelor's degree or a postgraduate degree, collected by job sites, surveys, dating apps and marketing databases.
  • Email addresses: The email address you used to register or log in. It is the most common field in breaches because it doubles as your username on most sites.
  • Genders: The gender or sex recorded on your profile, usually picked from a list at signup, sometimes with a title such as Mr or Ms or a gender identity option beyond male and female.
  • Geographic locations: A general location recorded on your account, such as a country, state, city, postcode or region, either typed in by you or estimated from your IP address.
  • Home ownership statuses: A field showing whether you own your home outright, have a mortgage, rent or live with family, collected by lenders, insurers, utilities and marketing surveys.
  • Income levels: An estimated or self-reported household or personal income band, collected by surveys, lenders, retailers, dating apps and marketing databases.
  • IP addresses: The network addresses your devices used when you signed up, logged in or posted, recorded by almost every website in its access logs.
  • Job titles: Your role or position, such as accounts payable officer, nurse or IT administrator, recorded by professional networks, business software, event registrations and marketing lists.

What to do now

  1. Check whether your own address is in this dataset with the free email breach check.
  2. Change the password on this service and every other site where you used the same password.
  3. Turn on two-factor authentication on your email account first, because it is the reset path for everything else.
  4. Treat calls and messages that quote real details about you as hostile until you verify them another way.

Frequently asked questions

What data was leaked in the Beautiful People breach?

The Beautiful People breach exposed Beauty ratings, Car ownership statuses, Dates of birth, Drinking habits, Education levels, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, Home ownership statuses, Income levels, IP addresses, Job titles, Names, Passwords, Personal descriptions, Personal interests, Physical attributes, Sexual orientations, Smoking habits, Website activity. About 1.1M accounts were affected.

Was I affected by the Beautiful People breach?

Run the free email breach check with the address you used on that service. It will tell you whether your address appears in this dataset.

What should I do about the Beautiful People breach?

Change the password on that account and everywhere you reused it, then turn on two-factor authentication. Passwords from this breach are traded and tried automatically against other sites.

Next steps