Breach date: 2024-05-02. Added to this index: 2024-05-10. Accounts affected: about 57M. Domain: thepostmillennial.com.
What happened
In May 2024, the conservative news website The Post Millennial suffered a data breach. The breach resulted in the defacement of the website and links posted to 3 different corpuses of data including hundreds of writers and editors (IP, physical address and email exposed), tens of thousands of subscribers to the site (name, email, username, phone and plain text password exposed), and tens of millions of email addresses from thousands of mailing lists alleged to have been used by The Post Millennial (this has not been independently verified). The mailing lists appear to be sourced from various campaigns not necessarily run by The Post Millennial and contain a variety of different personal attributes including name, phone and physical address (depending on the campaign). The data was subsequently posted to a popular hacking forum and extensively torrented.
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.
Genders: The gender or sex recorded on your profile, usually picked from a list at signup, sometimes with a title such as Mr or Ms or a gender identity option beyond male and female.
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.
Phone numbers: Your mobile or landline number, collected at signup for contact, delivery updates, marketing and two-factor codes.
Physical addresses: Your residential, postal, billing or delivery address, stored by retailers, utilities, banks, government services and almost any company that sends you something.
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 The Post Millennial breach?
The The Post Millennial breach exposed Email addresses, Genders, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Usernames. About 57M accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the The Post Millennial 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 The Post Millennial 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.