Was your data in the Lead Hunter breach?

Lead Hunter suffered a data breach in 2020 that exposed around 68,693,853 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 March 2020, a massive trove of personal information referred to as "Lead Hunter" was provided to HIBP after being found left exposed on a publicly facing Elasticsearch server. The data contained 69 million unique email addresses across 110 million rows of data accompanied by additional personal information including names, phone numbers, genders and physical addresses. At the time of publishing, the breach could not be attributed to those responsible for obtaining and exposing it. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com.

Breach details sourced from Have I Been Pwned, the industry-standard breach database. 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 Lead Hunter breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Email addresses, Genders, IP addresses, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses.

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. Home addresses: Get your address removed from data brokers — they re-list roughly every four months, so this needs repeating.
2. Phone numbers: Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider.
3. Names and usernames: Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts.
4. Email addresses: Treat any message referencing this service with suspicion, and never act on links in unexpected emails.
5. IP addresses: No direct action needed, but be wary of anyone quoting your location as “proof” of identity.
6. Check whether your own email appears in this breach — run a free scan to confirm before you spend time on the steps above.

This breach put your details on data-broker sites

Because Lead Hunter exposed 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 6 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 Lead Hunter breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.

• Was your data in the Exactis breach? (2018, ~131,577,763 accounts)
• Was your data in the Verifications.io breach? (2019, ~763,117,241 accounts)
• Was your data in the Ticketcounter breach? (2021, ~1,921,722 accounts)
• Was your data in the Modern Business Solutions breach? (2016, ~58,843,488 accounts)
• Was your data in the The Post Millennial breach? (2024, ~56,973,345 accounts)
• Was your data in the Fashion Nexus breach? (2018, ~1,279,263 accounts)

See all breaches we cover →