MyRecon OSINTSoundCloud
Behind the exposed accounts
In December 2025, SoundCloud announced it had discovered unauthorised activity on its platform .
Follow the story
On 15 December 2025, SoundCloud was breached. 29,815,722 accounts were exposed, including avatars, email addresses, geographic locations. MyRecon rates it 58/100, serious. That is roughly everyone in 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
2026-01-27. This is the catalogue date, not necessarily the disclosure date.
05Reported outcome
29,815,722 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people. The reported exposed data includes Avatars, Email addresses, Geographic locations, Names, Profile statistics, Usernames.
Nothing in this breach was secret. Display names, avatars, follower counts and countries were all public on the platform, and the email addresses were not. The attacker's entire contribution was joining the two, for roughly a fifth of the user base.
That join is the product. A handle chosen precisely because it is not your name is worth very little on its own; attached to a mailbox you actually read, it becomes an identity and a delivery channel at the same time. Artists who released work under an alias and listeners whose taste they would rather not have attributed to them are in the same file, and no amount of care about what they posted would have kept them out of it, the private half came from the account system, not from anything they published.
The practical exposure is phishing with an unusually good hook. A message quoting your real handle, your follower count and your country reads exactly like the platform, and the platform is precisely who a working musician expects to hear from about payouts, copyright claims and takedowns. Open the app and look; do not follow the link, however specific the message is about a track you genuinely uploaded.
The story behind the breach
In December 2025, SoundCloud announced it had discovered unauthorised activity on its platform . The incident allowed an attacker to map publicly available SoundCloud profile data to email addresses for approximately 20% of its users. The impacted data included 30M unique email addresses, names, usernames, avatars, follower and following counts and, in some cases, the user’s country.
The attackers later attempted to extort SoundCloud before publicly releasing the data the following month.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Read the original disclosure ↗
How did it happen?
The published account does not explain the exact way the data was obtained.
What was the motive?
The attackers later attempted to extort SoundCloud before publicly releasing the data the following month.
Reported demands or attempts to sell data describe what happened, rather than prove every attacker's intention.
What was the outcome?
29,815,722 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Avatars, Email addresses, Geographic locations, Names, Profile statistics, Usernames.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Avatars
Adds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
Email addresses
The address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
Geographic locations
Where the account was used, which narrows a person down further than most people expect.
Names
Turns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
Profile statistics
Adds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
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 SoundCloud 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 SoundCloud breach?
avatars, email addresses, geographic locations, names, profile statistics, 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 15 December 2025. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 27 January 2026, a gap of 43 days during which the data was already out.
Is the SoundCloud 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?
29,815,722 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Australia. 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.