Was your data in the Exactis breach?

Exactis (exactis.com) suffered a data breach in 2018 that exposed around 131,577,763 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 June 2018, the marketing firm Exactis inadvertently publicly leaked 340 million records of personal data. Security researcher Vinny Troia of Night Lion Security discovered the leak contained multiple terabytes of personal information spread across hundreds of separate fields including addresses, phone numbers, family structures and extensive profiling data. The data was collected as part of Exactis' service as a "compiler and aggregator of premium business & consumer data" which they then sell for profiling and marketing purposes. A small subset of the exposed fields were provided to Have I Been Pwned and contained 132 million unique email addresses.

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 Exactis breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Credit status information, Dates of birth, Education levels, Email addresses, Ethnicities, Family structure, Financial investments, Genders, Home ownership statuses, Income levels, IP addresses, Marital statuses, Names, Net worths, Occupations, Personal interests, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Religions, Spoken languages.

What to do if you were affected

These steps are ordered for this specific breach — the most urgent action given what leaked comes first.

1. 01Sensitive personal characteristics
   Under UK/EU GDPR you have a strong right to erasure here — exercise it with the service and with any site republishing the data.
2. 02Home addresses
   Get your address removed from data brokers — they re-list roughly every four months, so this needs repeating.
3. 03Dates of birth
   Never confirm your date of birth to an inbound caller — hang up and dial the organisation back on a published number.
4. 04Phone numbers
   Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider.
5. 05Names and usernames
   Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts.
6. 06Confirm you were actually in it
   Run a free scan before you spend time on the steps above.

This breach put your details on data-broker sites

Because Exactis exposed sensitive personal characteristics and home addresses, this is one of the breaches that feeds people-search and data-broker sites. Those sites scrape leaked databases, combine them with public records, and republish the result as a searchable profile — which is how a single breach turns into a permanent public listing. Removal works, but brokers typically re-list within about four months, so it has to be repeated.

See our broker-by-broker removal guides →

How urgent is this now?

This breach is over 8 years old. Old credentials still cause harm — leaked passwords from a decade ago are still tried against new accounts every day.

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

Breaches that exposed similar data

If the Exactis breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.

See all breaches we cover →