Breach date: 2015-11-03. Added to this index: 2016-01-24. Accounts affected: about 519K. Domain: vbulletin.com.
What happened
In November 2015, the forum software maker vBulletin suffered a serious data breach. The attack lead to the release of both forum user and customer accounts totalling almost 519k records. The breach included email addresses, birth dates, security questions and answers for customers and salted hashes of passwords for both sources.
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
Dates of birth: Your full birth date, day, month and year, collected at signup for age checks, identity verification, insurance quotes, birthday offers or government services.
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.
Homepage URLs: The personal website, blog, portfolio or social profile link you added to a forum, developer site or community profile.
Instant messenger identities: Usernames or IDs for messaging services such as Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal or Skype, or older services such as ICQ and AIM, stored in profile fields or contact records.
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.
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.
Security questions and answers: The questions and answers used to verify you during password resets or phone support, such as your first pet, first school, favourite teacher or mother's maiden name.
Spoken languages: The languages listed on your profile or account settings, collected by dating apps, job sites, travel services and customer support systems.
Website activity: Records of your actions on a website or app, such as pages viewed, searches, clicks, downloads, logins, cart activity, IP addresses and timestamps.
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 vBulletin breach?
The vBulletin breach exposed Dates of birth, Email addresses, Homepage URLs, Instant messenger identities, IP addresses, Passwords, Security questions and answers, Spoken languages, Website activity. About 519K accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the vBulletin 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 vBulletin 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.