MyRecon OSINTTokopedia
Behind the exposed accounts
In April 2020, Indonesia's largest online store Tokopedia suffered a data breach .
Follow the story
On 17 April 2020, Tokopedia was breached. 71,443,698 accounts were exposed, including dates of birth, email addresses, genders. MyRecon rates it 80/100, critical. 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
2020-05-02. This is the catalogue date, not necessarily the disclosure date.
05Reported outcome
71,443,698 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people. The reported exposed data includes Dates of birth, Email addresses, Genders, Names, Passwords.
Seventy-one million accounts at Indonesia's largest online marketplace. At that share of a national population a breach stops behaving like a corporate incident and starts behaving like a demographic dataset, names, genders and dates of birth for a substantial part of the country's online public, in one file, freely circulating.
The passwords were stored as SHA2-384 hashes, and the number in that name does more harm than good. SHA-2 is not a broken algorithm; it is the wrong kind of algorithm for this job. It is built to be fast, and for password storage speed is the defect, the whole point of bcrypt, scrypt and Argon2 is to be deliberately, tunably slow, so that an attacker with the file cannot test billions of guesses a second. A reassuring hash name is one of the most reliable ways to be wrong about password security.
Assume anything short or guessable in that file was recovered years ago, and change it anywhere it was reused. The other half of the record never expires and never gets rotated: a name, a gender and a date of birth do not change, and a date of birth is one of the three details call centres still accept as proof that the person on the line is who they say they are.
The story behind the breach
In April 2020, Indonesia's largest online store Tokopedia suffered a data breach . The incident resulted in 15M rows of data being posted to a popular hacking forum. An additional 76M rows were later provided to HIBP in July 2020. In total, the data included over 71M unique email addresses alongside names, genders, birth dates and passwords stored as SHA2-384 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?
71,443,698 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Dates of birth, Email addresses, Genders, Names, Passwords.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Dates of birth
One of the three things call centres ask to verify identity, and it never changes.
Email addresses
The address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
Genders
Small on its own; useful to anyone assembling a fuller profile.
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 Tokopedia 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 Tokopedia breach?
dates of birth, email addresses, genders, 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 17 April 2020. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 2 May 2020, a gap of 16 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Tokopedia 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?
71,443,698 accounts. That is roughly everyone in the United Kingdom. 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.