Breach date: 2012-05-21. Added to this index: 2016-06-28. Accounts affected: about 134K. Domain: whmcs.com.
What happened
In May 2012, the web hosting, billing and automation company WHMCS suffered a data breach that exposed 134k email addresses. The breach included extensive information about customers and payment histories including partial credit card numbers.
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.
Email messages: The content of emails you sent or received, including subject lines, message bodies, attachments and contacts, exposed through a compromised mailbox, an email provider or a company that kept copies.
Employers: The name of the company or organisation you work for, collected by professional networks, job sites, insurers, lenders and many signup forms.
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.
Partial credit card data: Fragments of a payment card rather than the full number, typically the first six or last four digits, the card brand, the expiry date or the cardholder name.
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.
Payment histories: A list of past payments linked to your account: dates, amounts, merchants, invoice numbers and sometimes the method used. It is held by billing platforms, subscription services, utilities and payment processors.
Physical addresses: Your residential, postal, billing or delivery address, stored by retailers, utilities, banks, government services and almost any company that sends you something.
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 WHMCS breach?
The WHMCS breach exposed Email addresses, Email messages, Employers, IP addresses, Names, Partial credit card data, Passwords, Payment histories, Physical addresses, Website activity. About 134K accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the WHMCS 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 WHMCS 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.