MyRecon OSINTNitro
Behind the exposed accounts
In September 2020, the Nitro PDF service suffered a massive data breach which exposed over 70 million unique email addresses .
Follow the story
On 28 September 2020, Nitro was breached. 77,159,696 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, names, passwords. MyRecon rates it 78/100, severe. That is roughly everyone in the United Kingdom.
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
2021-01-19. This is the catalogue date, not necessarily the disclosure date.
05Reported outcome
77,159,696 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people. The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Names, Passwords.
The record mentions it almost in passing, and it is the most interesting thing in the entry: alongside the addresses and the bcrypt hashes, the breach exposed the titles of converted documents. Not the documents themselves. Their names.
File names are content, written by people who assumed no one else would ever read them. "Offer letter final signed", "divorce petition draft 3", "Series A term sheet", "biopsy results", "redundancy list Q4". Nobody names a private file euphemistically for their own benefit. A list of what seventy-seven million people were converting to PDF is therefore a map of what they were doing, legal trouble, job moves, medical news, deals in progress, indexed by email address and dated.
For companies that is targeting material of unusual quality: knowing an organisation converted a term sheet or a redundancy list in a particular week tells an attacker which pretext to use and exactly when to send it. For individuals it is an inference problem with no remedy. The password can be changed, and bcrypt probably held it anyway. The title of a document you converted five years ago cannot be renamed after the fact.
The story behind the breach
In September 2020, the Nitro PDF service suffered a massive data breach which exposed over 70 million unique email addresses . The breach also exposed names, bcrypt password hashes and the titles of converted documents. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com .
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?
77,159,696 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Names, Passwords.
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.
Passwords
Anyone reusing this password elsewhere has those accounts exposed too, credential stuffing is automated and tries them all within days.
What to do if you were in it
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the Nitro 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 Nitro breach?
email addresses, names, passwords. 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 28 September 2020. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 19 January 2021, a gap of 113 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Nitro 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?
77,159,696 accounts. That is roughly everyone in the United Kingdom. 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.