MyRecon OSINTGravatar
Behind the exposed accounts
In October 2020, a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service for providing globally unique avatars .
Follow the story
On 3 October 2020, Gravatar was breached. 113,990,759 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, names, usernames. MyRecon rates it 58/100, serious. That is roughly everyone in Germany.
How the story unfolded
Open a step to read the detail. Missing dates stay unknown.
02Entry point
In October 2020, a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service for providing globally unique avatars . 167 million names, usernames and MD5 hashes of email addresses used to reference users' avatars were subsequently scraped and distributed within the hacking community.
03Discovery and disclosure
A separate discovery or company-disclosure date is not established by this feed record.
04Added to the breach catalogue
2021-12-05. This is the catalogue date, not necessarily the disclosure date.
05Reported outcome
113,990,759 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people. The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Names, Usernames.
There is a design lesson buried in this record that outlives the incident. Gravatar identified users by the MD5 hash of their email address, published in the page source of every site that showed an avatar. The reasoning was reasonable at the time: a hash is not the address, so the address is not being disclosed.
It does not hold. MD5 is fast, email addresses follow predictable patterns, and the total space of plausible addresses is small enough to work through. Of 167 million scraped hashes, 114 million were reversed to the original address. Hashing an identifier that an attacker can guess is not anonymisation; it is a lookup table waiting to be built.
Nothing sensitive was stored and nothing was stolen in the conventional sense, this was scraping a service that was answering exactly as designed. The exposure is the mapping itself: a name, a username and the email address behind it, for a hundred million people who had only ever wanted a profile picture to follow them between websites.
The story behind the breach
In October 2020, a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service for providing globally unique avatars . 167 million names, usernames and MD5 hashes of email addresses used to reference users' avatars were subsequently scraped and distributed within the hacking community.
114 million of the MD5 hashes were cracked and distributed alongside the source hash, thus disclosing the original email address and accompanying data. Following the impacted email addresses being searchable in HIBP, Gravatar release an FAQ detailing the incident .
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
How did it happen?
In October 2020, a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service for providing globally unique avatars .
167 million names, usernames and MD5 hashes of email addresses used to reference users' avatars were subsequently scraped and distributed within the hacking community.
What was the motive?
The published account does not establish the motive. We cannot tell what the attackers intended from the exposed data alone.
Reported demands or attempts to sell data describe what happened, rather than prove every attacker's intention.
What was the outcome?
113,990,759 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Names, Usernames.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Email addresses
The address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
Names
Turns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
Usernames
A handle links this account to every other place the same handle is used.
What to do if you were in it
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the Gravatar breach?
Use the email box on this page. The result applies only to this incident. If the provider does not cover this breach, we say so. A missing match does not prove you were unaffected.
What data was leaked in the Gravatar breach?
email addresses, names, usernames. Each one is explained above, along with what it means for the person it belongs to.
When did it happen, and when did it become public?
The breach is dated 3 October 2020. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 5 December 2021, a gap of 429 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Gravatar breach real?
Yes. Have I Been Pwned lists it as verified, meaning the data was checked against the source rather than taken on trust.
How many people were affected?
113,990,759 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Germany. That is accounts rather than people, one person often has several.
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Three kinds of content appear on this page and they are kept apart deliberately. The breach description is quoted from Have I Been Pwned under its licence. The severity score, the field-by-field explanation and the advice are computed from the record itself, every sentence derives from a number or a flag in it, which is what stops the analysis drifting from the evidence. Anything under the "MyRecon's take" byline is editorial: our reading of this breach, presented as opinion rather than as a finding.