Breach date: 2021-02-26. Added to this index: 2021-03-03. Accounts affected: about 67K. Domain: gab.com.
What happened
In February 2021, the alt-tech social network service Gab suffered a data breach. The incident exposed almost 70GB of data including 4M user accounts, a small number of private chat logs and a list of public groups and public posts made to the service. Only a small number of accounts included email addresses and / or passwords stored as bcrypt hashes with a total of 66.5k unique email addresses being exposed across the corpus of data.
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
Avatars: The small profile image attached to your account, which may be a real photo, a cartoon, a generated icon or a picture taken from another service.
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.
Private messages: Direct messages, chats and inbox conversations on a platform, which can include photos, links, attachments, addresses, phone numbers and details you shared expecting only one person to read.
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
Check whether your own address is in this dataset with the free email breach check.
Change the password on this service and every other site where you used the same password.
Turn on two-factor authentication on your email account first, because it is the reset path for everything else.
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 Gab breach?
The Gab breach exposed Avatars, Email addresses, Names, Passwords, Private messages, Usernames. About 67K accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the Gab 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 Gab 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.