Was your data in the Bookchor breach?
Check whether your email address was in it
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Bookchor (bookchor.com) suffered a data breach in 2021 that exposed around 498,297 accounts. If you had an account, some of your personal data may be circulating in leaked databases. The fastest way to know is to check your own email — free, in about 30 seconds, no password required.
What happened
In January 2021, the Indian book trading website Bookchor suffered a data breach that exposed half a million customer records. The exposed data included email and IP addresses, names, genders, dates of birth, phone numbers and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes. The data was subsequently traded on a popular hacking forum.
Breach record from Have I Been Pwned, CC BY 4.0. Risk analysis by Nullivo.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Not all breaches carry the same risk — what matters is which fields leaked. Here is what the Bookchor breach exposed and what each item actually enables:
Also listed in this breach: Dates of birth, Email addresses, Genders, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Phone numbers, Social media profiles.
What to do if you were affected
These steps are ordered for this specific breach — the most urgent action given what leaked comes first.
- Passwords
Change this password everywhere you have reused it, starting with your email account — whoever controls your email can reset everything else. - Dates of birth
Never confirm your date of birth to an inbound caller — hang up and dial the organisation back on a published number. - Phone numbers
Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider. - Names and usernames
Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts. - Email addresses
Treat any message referencing this service with suspicion, and never act on links in unexpected emails. - Confirm you were actually in it
Run a free scan before you spend time on the steps above.
How urgent is this now?
This data has been circulating for around 5 years, which means it has been copied, combined with other leaks and indexed by search tools many times over.
Passwords are the reason breach age matters less than people expect. Leaked credentials are compiled into wordlists that get tried against new services for years afterwards, so a password exposed here is unsafe to use anywhere, ever again.
Remember: a breach can’t be “un-leaked” — once a database is out, it exists in countless copies. The goal is to make the leaked data useless: change what can be changed, lock down what can’t, and remove what has been republished.
Frequently asked questions
What data was exposed in the Bookchor breach?
The Bookchor breach exposed passwords, dates of birth, phone numbers, names and usernames, email addresses, ip addresses. Attackers replay leaked passwords across other sites (“credential stuffing”). Because most people reuse passwords, one leak often unlocks email, shopping and banking accounts elsewhere.
How many people were affected by the Bookchor breach?
Around 498,297 accounts were exposed, making it a mid-sized breach.
What should I do if I had a Bookchor account?
Change this password everywhere you have reused it, starting with your email account — whoever controls your email can reset everything else. You can check whether your own email appears in this breach with a free Nullivo scan — no password required.
Breaches that exposed similar data
If the Bookchor breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.