mail.ru Dump data breach

Breach date: 2014-09-10. Added to this index: 2014-09-12. Accounts affected: about 17M. Domain: mail.ru.

What happened

In September 2014, several large dumps of user accounts appeared on the Russian Bitcoin Security Forum including one with nearly 5M email addresses and passwords, predominantly on the mail.ru domain. Whilst unlikely to be the result of a direct attack against mail.ru, the credentials were confirmed by many as legitimate for other services they had subscribed to. Further data allegedly valid for mail.ru and containing email addresses and plain text passwords was added in January 2018 bringing to total to more than 16M records. The incident was also then flagged as "unverified", a concept that was introduced after the initial data load in 2014.

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 mail.ru Dump breach?

The mail.ru Dump breach exposed Email addresses, Passwords. About 17M accounts were affected.

Was I affected by the mail.ru Dump 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 mail.ru Dump 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