imgur data breach

Breach date: 2013-09-01. Added to this index: 2017-11-25. Accounts affected: about 1.7M. Domain: imgur.com.

What happened

In September 2013, the online image sharing community imgur suffered a data breach. A selection of the data containing 1.7 million email addresses and passwords surfaced more than 4 years later in November 2017. Although imgur stored passwords as SHA-256 hashes, the data in the breach contained plain text passwords suggesting that many of the original hashes had been cracked. imgur advises that they rolled over to bcrypt hashes in 2016.

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.

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 imgur breach?

The imgur breach exposed Email addresses, Passwords. About 1.7M accounts were affected.

Was I affected by the imgur 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 imgur 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