MyRecon OSINT
CDEK
On 9 March 2022, CDEK was breached. 19,218,203 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, names, phone numbers. MyRecon rates it 55/100, serious. That is about 71% of the population of Australia.
This is one of the few entries in the archive flagged as unverified, and that flag is the reason it is worth reading. The data was published by a hacktivist collective during a war, with the stated aim of de-anonymising Russian internet users at scale, and its authenticity could not be independently established. It is filed as what it is: an allegation with 19 million addresses attached.
Politically motivated dumps fail differently from criminal ones. A seller has a commercial interest in the data being genuine, because buyers who get fabricated files do not come back. A collective publishing to cause harm to a population has an interest in publication itself, accuracy is a secondary concern, and mixing authentic records with assembled ones costs them nothing and is nearly impossible to disprove from outside.
Both readings carry real risk, which is the uncomfortable part. Courier records are home addresses and delivery histories, about as sensitive as consumer data gets; and for people living under a government that may take an interest in who appears in a hostile dump, being listed is its own hazard whether or not the row is real. Treat an unverified appearance as neither proof that you were breached nor evidence that you were not.
What happened
In early 2022, a collective known as IT Army whose stated goal is to "completely de-anonymise most Russian users by leaking hundreds of gigabytes of databases" published over 30GB of data allegedly sourced from Russian courier service CDEK. The data contained over 19M unique email addresses along with names and phone numbers. The authenticity of the breach could not be independently established and has been flagged as "unverified".
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
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
- 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.
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.
- 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 CDEK 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 CDEK breach?
email addresses, names, phone numbers. 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 9 March 2022. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 17 March 2022, a gap of 8 days during which the data was already out.
Is the CDEK breach real?
It is listed as unverified. The data exists and has been indexed, but it has not been confirmed against the named source, so treat the origin as unproven.
How many people were affected?
19,218,203 accounts. That is about 71% of the population of 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.