Was your data in the Qatar National Bank breach?

Qatar National Bank (qnb.com) suffered a data breach in 2015 that exposed around 88,678 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 July 2015, the Qatar National Bank suffered a data breach which exposed 15k documents totalling 1.4GB and detailing more than 100k accounts with passwords and PINs. The incident was made public some 9 months later in April 2016 when the documents appeared publicly on a file sharing site. Analysis of the breached data suggests the attack began by exploiting a SQL injection flaw in the bank's website.

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 Qatar National Bank breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Bank account numbers, Customer feedback, Dates of birth, Financial transactions, Genders, Geographic locations, Government issued IDs, IP addresses, Marital statuses, Names, Passwords, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, PINs, Security questions and answers, 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. 01Payment or bank details
   Contact your bank, ask them to monitor or reissue the card, and check statements for small “test” transactions.
2. 02Government identifiers
   Consider a credit freeze or fraud alert with the credit reference agencies, and watch for accounts you did not open.
3. 03Passwords
   Change this password everywhere you have reused it, starting with your email account — whoever controls your email can reset everything else.
4. 04Home addresses
   Get your address removed from data brokers — they re-list roughly every four months, so this needs repeating.
5. 05Security questions and answers
   Change the answers on every account using them, and treat the answers as passwords (random strings stored in a password manager).
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 Qatar National Bank 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 11 years old. Old credentials still cause harm — leaked passwords from a decade ago are still tried against new accounts every day.

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

Breaches that exposed similar data

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

See all breaches we cover →