TrueFire
February 21, 2020
•[ hack, education ]
In February 2020, the guitar tuition website TrueFire suffered a data breach which impacted 600k members. The breach exposed extensive personal information including names, email and physical addresses, account balances and unsalted MD5 password hashes. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com.
TheGradCafe
February 26, 2023
•[ leak, education ]
In February 2023, the grad school admissions search website TheGradCafe suffered a data breach that disclosed the personal records of 310k users. The data included email addresses, names and usernames, genders, geographic locations and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes. Some records also included physical address, phone number and date of birth. TheGradCafe did not respond to multiple attempts to disclose the breach.
VTech
November 13, 2015
•[ hack, misconfiguration, education ]
In November 2015, hackers extracted more than 4.8 million parents' and 227k children's accounts from VTech's Learning Lodge website. The Hong Kong company produces learning products for children including software sold via the compromised website. The data breach exposed extensive personal details including home addresses, security questions and answers and passwords stored as weak MD5 hashes. Furthermore, children's details including names, ages, genders and associations to their parents' records were also exposed.
DataCamp
January 30, 2017
•[ leak, education ]
In December 2018, the data science website DataCamp suffered a data breach of records dating back to January 2017. The incident exposed 760k unique email and IP addresses along with names and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes. In 2019, the data appeared listed for sale on a dark web marketplace (along with several other large breaches) and subsequently began circulating more broadly. The data was provided to HIBP by a source who requested it to be attributed to "BenjaminBlue@exploit.im".
TaiLieu
November 24, 2019
•[ hack, misconfiguration, education ]
In November 2019, the Vietnamese education website TaiLieu allegedly suffered a data breach exposing 7.3M customer records. Impacted data included names and usernames, email addresses, dates of birth, genders and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com after being shared on a popular hacking forum. TaiLieu did not respond when contacted about the incident.
Hub4Tech
January 1, 2017
•[ leak, sqlinjection, education ]
On an unknown date in approximately 2017, the Indian training and assessment service known as Hub4Tech suffered a data breach via a SQL injection attack. The incident exposed almost 37k unique email addresses and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes. No response was received from Hub4Tech when contacted about the incident.
Vedantu
July 8, 2019
•[ leak, misconfiguration, education ]
In mid-2019, the Indian interactive online tutoring platform Vedantu suffered a data breach which exposed the personal data of 687k users. The JSON formatted database dump exposed extensive personal information including email and IP address, names, phone numbers, genders and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes. When contacted about the incident, Vedantu advised that they were aware of the breach and were in the process of informing their customers.
PoinCampus
November 14, 2024
•[ leak, education ]
In November 2024, the South Korean education platform PoinCampus suffered a data breach which was later published to a popular hacking forum. The data included 89k unique email addresses, names and a small number of phone numbers and dates of birth. The data was provided to HIBP by a source who requested it be attributed to "Threat Actor 888".
NurseryCam
February 12, 2021
•[ leak, misconfiguration, education ]
In February 2021, a series of egregiously bad security flaws were identified in the NurseryCam system designed for parents to remotely monitor their children whilst attending nursery. The flaws led to the exposure of over 10k parent records before the service was shut down. The email addresses alone were provided to Have I Been Pwned to ensure parents were properly notified of the incident.
The Heritage Foundation
July 9, 2024
•[ hack, education ]
In July 2024, hacktivists published almost 2GB of data taken from The Heritage Foundation and their media arm, The Daily Signal. The data contained 72k unique email addresses, primarily used for commenting on articles (along with names, IP addresses and the comments left) and by content contributors (along with usernames and passwords stored as either MD5 or phpass hashes).
MDPI
August 30, 2016
•[ leak, misconfiguration, education ]
In August 2016, the Swiss scholarly open access publisher known as MDPI had 17.5GB of data obtained from an unprotected Mongo DB instance. The data contained email exchanges between MDPI and their authors and reviewers which included 845k unique email addresses. MDPI have confirmed that the system has since been protected and that no data of a sensitive nature was impacted. As such, they concluded that notification to their subscribers was not necessary due to the fact that all their authors and reviewers are available online on their website.
Youthmanual
January 31, 2019
•[ leak, education ]
In January 2019, the Indonesian college and career platform Youthmanual suffered a data breach that exposed 1.1M records of data. The breached included 938k unique email addresses along with extensive personal information including names, genders, dates and places of birth, phone numbers, physical addresses and salted SHA-1 password hashes.
Chegg
April 28, 2018
•[ hack, misconfiguration, education ]
In April 2018, the textbook rental service Chegg suffered a data breach that impacted 40 million subscribers. The exposed data included email addresses, usernames, names and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes. A small number of records also contained physical address or phone number. The data was provided to HIBP by a source who requested it be attributed to "JimScott.Sec@protonmail.com".
Ajarn
December 13, 2018
•[ leak, education ]
In September 2021, the Thai-based English language teaching website Ajarn discovered they'd been the victim of a data breach dating back to December 2018. The breach was self-submitted to HIBP and included 266k email addresses, names, genders, phone numbers and other personal information. Hashed passwords were also impacted in the breach.
Edmodo
May 11, 2017
•[ leak, hack, education ]
In May 2017, the education platform Edmodo was hacked resulting in the exposure of 77 million records comprised of over 43 million unique customer email addresses. The data was consequently published to a popular hacking forum and made freely available. The records in the breach included usernames, email addresses and bcrypt hashes of passwords.
Scholastic
January 8, 2025
•[ hack, education ]
In January 2025, a data breach of the publishing company Scholastic surfaced. The breach contained 4.2M unique email addresses with many of the records also including name, phone number and physical address.
Duolingo
January 24, 2023
•[ leak, misconfiguration, education ]
In August 2023, 2.6M records of data scraped from Duolingo were broadly distributed on a popular hacking forum. Obtained by enumerating a vulnerable API, the data had earlier appeared for sale in January 2023 and contained email addresses, names, the languages being learned, XP (experience points), and other data related to learning progress on Duolingo. Whilst some of the data attributes are intentionally public, the ability to map private email addresses to them presents an ongoing risk to user privacy.
Universarium
November 1, 2019
•[ leak, misconfiguration, education ]
In approximately November 2019, the Russian "Remote preparatory faculty for IT specialties" Universarium suffered a data breach. The incident exposed 565k email addresses and passwords in plain text. Universarium did not respond to multiple attempts to make contact over a period of many weeks. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com.
University of California
December 24, 2020
•[ hack, misconfiguration, education ]
In December 2020, the University of California suffered a data breach due to vulnerability in in a third-party provider, Accellion. The breach exposed extensive personal data on both students and staff including 547 thousand unique email addresses, names, dates of birth, genders, social security numbers, ethnicities and other academic related data attributes. Further analysis is available in Exploring the Impact of the UC Data Breach. The data was provided to HIBP courtesy of Cyril Gorlla.
GeniusU
October 2, 2020
•[ leak, education ]
In November 2020, a collection of data breaches were made public including the "Entrepreneur Success Platform", GeniusU. Dating back to the previous month, the data included 1.3M names, email and IP addresses, genders, links to social media profiles and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com.
