MyRecon OSINTHjedd
Behind the exposed accounts
In July 2022, the Chinese adult website Hjedd was found to be leaking more than 13M customer records which subsequently appeared on a popular hacking forum .
Follow the story
On 18 July 2022, Hjedd was breached. 13,204,029 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, ip addresses, passwords. MyRecon rates it 77/100, severe. That is about 49% of the population of Australia.
How the story unfolded
Open a step to read the detail. Missing dates stay unknown.
02Entry point
The published account does not explain the exact way the data was obtained.
03Discovery and disclosure
A separate discovery or company-disclosure date is not established by this feed record.
04Added to the breach catalogue
2023-10-05. This is the catalogue date, not necessarily the disclosure date.
05Reported outcome
13,204,029 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people. The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, IP addresses, Passwords, Usernames.
The passwords here were stored as bcrypt hashes, which is the right answer, slow by design, salted per record, still holding up. It makes almost no difference to the people in this file, because the password was never the damaging part. The damaging part is an email address appearing next to the name of an adult website.
That is what the sensitive flag on this entry means, and why those entries behave unlike the rest of the archive. Everywhere else, exposure creates a task you can complete: change this, freeze that, watch a statement. Here the harm is the disclosure itself, and disclosure has no undo. A password can be rotated. Membership of a site cannot be un-leaked, and the IP addresses alongside it narrow down where the account was used.
The predictable consequence is extortion mail, and knowing where the accurate details came from is what defuses it. A message quoting the real site name, sometimes a real old password, is designed to make the rest of the claim credible, and the rest of the claim is invented. There are no recordings; there is a breach file with your address in it, bought for a few dollars. Replying or paying proves the mailbox is live, and that is the only thing the sender learns.
The story behind the breach
In July 2022, the Chinese adult website Hjedd was found to be leaking more than 13M customer records which subsequently appeared on a popular hacking forum . The exposed data included email and IP addresses, usernames and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
How did it happen?
The published account does not explain the exact way the data was obtained.
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?
13,204,029 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, IP addresses, Passwords, Usernames.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Email addresses
The address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
IP addresses
Approximate location at the time of use, and a way to correlate accounts across services.
Passwords
Anyone reusing this password elsewhere has those accounts exposed too, credential stuffing is automated and tries them all within days.
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 Hjedd 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 Hjedd breach?
email addresses, ip addresses, passwords, 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 18 July 2022. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 5 October 2023, a gap of 444 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Hjedd 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?
13,204,029 accounts. That is about 49% of the population of Australia. That is accounts rather than people, one person often has several.
Read next
Also in the archive
Case Files: how the landmark breaches actually happened →
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.