MyRecon OSINT
DemandScience by Pure Incubation
On 28 February 2024, DemandScience by Pure Incubation was breached. 121,796,165 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, employers, job titles. MyRecon rates it 78/100, severe. That is roughly everyone in Germany.
Nobody in this file signed up for anything. DemandScience is a business-to-business marketing data company: the records were aggregated from public and commercial sources into contact profiles, and the people described by them were never customers. The exposure is a by-product of an industry that treats professional identity as inventory.
The record also notes the source, a decommissioned legacy system. That is the most preventable failure mode in this entire archive. A system that has been switched off in the organisational sense but not the technical one has no owner, no patching schedule and no monitoring, while still holding a complete copy of the data it was retired with. Every large company has one.
What makes this data valuable is not its sensitivity but its precision. A name, a corporate email address, a job title and an employer is the exact recipe for business email compromise: it identifies who approves payments, who reports to whom, and who would plausibly receive an instruction from a senior colleague. If your details are here, the risk lands at work rather than at home, verify payment and account-change requests through a channel you initiated, every time, regardless of how convincing the sender looks.
The story behind the breach
In early 2024, a large corpus of data from DemandScience (a company owned by Pure Incubation), appeared for sale on a popular hacking forum . Later attributed to a leak from a decommissioned legacy system, the breach contained extensive data that was largely business contact information aggregated from public sources. Specifically, the data included 122M unique corporate email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, employers and job titles.
It also included names and for many individuals, a link to their LinkedIn profile.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
How did it happen?
The published account does not explain the exact way the data was obtained.
What was the motive?
The published account does not establish the motive. We cannot tell what the attackers intended from the exposed data alone.
Reported demands or attempts to sell data describe what happened, rather than prove every attacker's intention.
What was the outcome?
121,796,165 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Employers, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Social media profiles.
What was exposed, and why it matters
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
- EmployersConnects a personal account to a workplace, which is how attackers pivot from a person to a company.
- 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.
- Social media profilesAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
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 DemandScience by Pure Incubation breach?
Use the email box on this page. The result applies only to this incident. If the provider does not cover this breach, we say so. A missing match does not prove you were unaffected.
What data was leaked in the DemandScience by Pure Incubation breach?
email addresses, employers, job titles, names, phone numbers, physical addresses, social media profiles. 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 28 February 2024. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 13 November 2024, a gap of 259 days during which the data was already out.
Is the DemandScience by Pure Incubation 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?
121,796,165 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Germany. 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.