Houzz data breach

Breach date: 2018-05-23. Added to this index: 2019-03-12. Accounts affected: about 49M. Domain: houzz.com.

What happened

In mid-2018, the housing design website Houzz suffered a data breach. The company learned of the incident later that year then disclosed it to impacted members in February 2019. Almost 49 million unique email addresses were in the breach alongside names, IP addresses, geographic locations and either salted hashes of passwords or links to social media profiles used to authenticate to the service. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com.

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Social media profiles: Usernames, profile URLs or handles for social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn or Discord, stored alongside another account.
  • 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 Houzz breach?

The Houzz breach exposed Email addresses, Geographic locations, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Social media profiles, Usernames. About 49M accounts were affected.

Was I affected by the Houzz 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 Houzz 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