MyRecon OSINTPublic Business Data
On 19 August 2021, Public Business Data was breached. 27,917,714 accounts were exposed, including dates of birth, email addresses, job titles. MyRecon rates it 74/100, severe. That is roughly everyone in Australia.
Nobody in this file has a relationship with the company named at the top of it. Personal details were collated from public sources into Bureau van Dijk's Orbis product, Orbis was licensed to customers, and the leak came from one of those customers. Three hops between the person and the breach, and the person chose none of them.
That is the structural failure of the data broker economy rather than a lapse by anyone in particular. Aggregation is the entire product: a name in one register, a date of birth in a filing, a job title on a third site are individually public and individually useless, and combining them into a profile is what the customer is paying for. Once assembled, the profile copies perfectly and ends up exactly as secure as the least careful licensee. The vendor can be faultless and the outcome identical.
Which is why "sourced from public information" reassures less than it is meant to. Nothing here can be withdrawn at source, because none of it was private to begin with, and there is no account to close, no consent to revoke, and no notification obligation to anyone whose dossier was compiled without their involvement. The exposure is the collation, and the collation is the business.
What happened
In approximately August 2021, hundreds of gigabytes of business data collated from public sources was obtained and later published to a popular hacking forum. Sourced from a customer of Bureau van Dijk's (BvD) "Orbis" product, the corpus of data released contained hundreds of millions of lines about corporations and individuals, including personal information such as names and dates of birth. The data also included 28M unique email addresses along with physical addresses (presumedly corporate locations), phone numbers and job titles. There was no unauthorised access to BvD's systems, nor did the incident expose any of their or parent company's Moody's clients.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Who was behind it
No party has been publicly confirmed as responsible, and this page will not name one. Most breaches are never formally attributed: data surfaces on a forum or inside a combined dump long after the intrusion, and the trail back to a specific actor is rarely made public. Where a group has claimed responsibility it is usually named in the account above, that claim is theirs, not a finding of ours.
What was exposed, and why it matters
- Dates of birthOne of the three things call centres ask to verify identity, and it never changes.
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
- Job titlesIdentifies who has access to what, which is how targets for business email compromise are picked.
- NamesTurns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
- Phone numbersEnables SIM-swap attacks against SMS two-factor codes, and puts the number on scam-call lists indefinitely.
- Physical addressesWhere someone actually lives. Combined with a name this moves the risk off the internet.
What to do if you were in it
- Move two-factor authentication off SMS and onto an authenticator app, which a SIM swap cannot intercept.
- Be sceptical of post and callers who already know your address, knowing it is no longer evidence of anything.
- Expect better-aimed phishing. A message that already knows your name and where you have an account is the whole point of a breach like this.
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the Public Business Data breach?
Enter it in the box at the top of this page. MyRecon checks it against this breach and every other one on record, and the address is never stored.
What data was leaked in the Public Business Data breach?
dates of birth, email addresses, job titles, names, phone numbers, physical addresses. Each one is explained above, along with what it means for the person it belongs to.
When did it happen, and when did it become public?
The breach is dated 19 August 2021. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 9 October 2023, a gap of 781 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Public Business Data breach real?
Yes. Have I Been Pwned lists it as verified, meaning the data was checked against the source rather than taken on trust.
How many people were affected?
27,917,714 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Australia. That is accounts rather than people, one person often has several.
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Three kinds of content appear on this page and they are kept apart deliberately. The breach description is quoted from Have I Been Pwned under its licence. The severity score, the field-by-field explanation and the advice are computed from the record itself, every sentence derives from a number or a flag in it, which is what stops the analysis drifting from the evidence. Anything under the "MyRecon's take" byline is editorial: our reading of this breach, presented as opinion rather than as a finding.