Freedom Hosting II data breach

Breach date: 2017-01-31. Added to this index: 2017-02-05. Accounts affected: about 381K. Domain: fhostingesps6bly.onion.

What happened

In January 2017, the free hidden service host Freedom Hosting II suffered a data breach. The attack allegedly took down 20% of dark web sites running behind Tor hidden services with the attacker claiming that of the 10,613 impacted sites, more than 50% of the content was child pornography. The hack led to the exposure of MySQL databases for the sites which included a vast amount of information on the hidden services Freedom Hosting II was managing. The impacted data classes far exceeds those listed for the breach and differ between the thousands of impacted sites.

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.
  • 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.

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 Freedom Hosting II breach?

The Freedom Hosting II breach exposed Email addresses, Passwords, Usernames. About 381K accounts were affected.

Was I affected by the Freedom Hosting II 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 Freedom Hosting II 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