Was your data in the Vodafone breach?

Vodafone (vodafone.is) suffered a data breach in 2013 that exposed around 56,021 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 November 2013, Vodafone in Iceland suffered an attack attributed to the Turkish hacker collective "Maxn3y". The data was consequently publicly exposed and included user names, email addresses, social security numbers, SMS message, server logs and passwords from a variety of different internal sources.

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 Vodafone breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Credit cards, Email addresses, Government issued IDs, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Purchases, SMS messages, Usernames.

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. 05Private messages
   Consider what was discussed on this service and whether anything needs changing (shared passwords, personal disclosures).
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 Vodafone 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 13 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 Vodafone breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.

See all breaches we cover →