MyRecon OSINT
Canadian Tire
On 2 October 2025, Canadian Tire was breached. 38,306,562 accounts were exposed, including dates of birth, email addresses, genders. MyRecon rates it 77/100 — severe. That is roughly everyone in Australia.
The passwords in this one were stored as PBKDF2 hashes, which is the thing most companies in this archive got wrong and Canadian Tire got right. It is worth saying plainly, because breach coverage rarely does: a strong, slow hash means the password field is the part of this file least likely to hurt you.
The part that will is the combination underneath it. Name, date of birth, address, phone number and the card type, expiry and last four digits, all in one row. The disclosure notes that bank account information was not affected, which is true and beside the point — nobody defrauds a retail customer by knowing their account number. They do it by calling with the last four digits of the card, the correct expiry, and the customer's own date of birth, which is a script this file writes for them.
Masked card data is classified as low sensitivity because it cannot be used to transact. It can be used to be believed, and that is the attack that follows a retail breach.
What happened
In October 2025, retailer Canadian Tire was the victim of a data breach that exposed almost 42M records. The data contained 38M unique email addresses along with names, phone numbers and physical addresses. Passwords were stored as PBKDF2 hashes and for a subset of records, dates of birth and partial credit card data were also included (card type, expiry and masked card number). In its disclosure notice, Canadian Tire advised that the incident did not impact bank account information or loyalty program data.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Read the original disclosure ↗
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.
- GendersSmall on its own; useful to anyone assembling a fuller profile.
- NamesTurns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
- Partial credit card dataNot enough to spend, but enough to convince a victim that a caller is genuinely from their bank.
- PasswordsAnyone reusing this password elsewhere has those accounts exposed too — credential stuffing is automated and tries them all within days.
- 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
- Change this password anywhere you reused it, starting with your email account — that is the one that can reset all the others.
- 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 Canadian Tire 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 Canadian Tire breach?
dates of birth, email addresses, genders, names, partial credit card data, passwords, 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 2 October 2025. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 25 February 2026, a gap of 146 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Canadian Tire 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?
38,306,562 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Australia. That is accounts rather than people — one person often has several.
Read next
Also in the archive
Case Files: how the landmark breaches actually happened →
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.