Business Acumen Magazine data breach

Breach date: 2014-04-25. Added to this index: 2014-05-11. Accounts affected: about 27K. Domain: businessacumen.biz.

What happened

In April 2014, the Australian "Business Acumen Magazine" website was hacked by an attacker known as 1337MiR. The breach resulted in over 26,000 accounts being exposed including usernames, email addresses and password stored with a weak cryptographic hashing algorithm (MD5 with no salt).

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

  • 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.
  • Names: Your first name, surname and sometimes middle name or initials, as you gave them when you signed up. It appears in almost every breach because nearly every account asks for it.
  • Passwords: The secret you use to sign in, stored by the breached service either in plain text, in a scrambled form called a hash, or encrypted. How it was stored decides how quickly it can be recovered.
  • Usernames: The handle or login name you chose for an account, which may be public on forums, games and social platforms or used privately to sign in.
  • Website activity: Records of your actions on a website or app, such as pages viewed, searches, clicks, downloads, logins, cart activity, IP addresses and timestamps.

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 Business Acumen Magazine breach?

The Business Acumen Magazine breach exposed Email addresses, Names, Passwords, Usernames, Website activity. About 27K accounts were affected.

Was I affected by the Business Acumen Magazine 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 Business Acumen Magazine 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