Breach date: 2020-05-10. Added to this index: 2023-06-10. Accounts affected: about 8.9M. Domain: zacks.com.
What happened
In December 2022, the investment research company Zacks announced a data breach. The following month, reports emerged of the incident impacting 820k customers. However, in June 2023, a corpus of data with almost 9M Zacks customers appeared before being broadly circulated on a popular hacking forum. The most recent data was dated May 2020 and included names, usernames, email and physical addresses, phone numbers and passwords stored as unsalted SHA-256 hashes. On disclosure of the larger breach, Zacks advised that in addition to their original report "the unauthorised third parties also gained access to encrypted [sic] passwords of zacks.com customers, but only in the encrypted [sic] format".
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.
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 Zacks breach?
The Zacks breach exposed Email addresses, Names, Passwords, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Usernames. About 8.9M accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the Zacks 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 Zacks 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.