MyRecon OSINT
Genesis Market
On 5 April 2023, Genesis Market was breached. 8,000,000 accounts were exposed, including browser user agent details, credit card cvv, credit cards. MyRecon rates it 76/100, severe. That is about 30% of the population of Australia.
Genesis Market is the entry in this archive that best explains why changing your password is sometimes not enough. The service did not primarily trade passwords: it traded browser fingerprints and session cookies, the tokens that tell a website you have already logged in, bundled with enough device detail to make the impersonation look like your own machine.
A buyer could load that package and appear to a service as the victim, on the victim's apparent device, already authenticated. No password prompt, and in many cases no two-factor challenge either, because the session had already passed it. This is why security advice increasingly includes "sign out of all sessions everywhere" after a compromise, which is a control most people have never used.
The other thing to take from this record is where the data came from. Genesis Market's inventory was harvested from infected consumer devices, which means the victims were compromised personally rather than through any company they dealt with. The site was taken down in a coordinated international operation in 2023, and the underlying trade did not stop, the marketplaces changed names.
If you are in this file, treat the device as the problem rather than the account. Clean or rebuild it, then revoke active sessions on your important services, then change passwords, in that order, because doing it the other way round means handing your new password to whatever is still watching.
The story behind the breach
In April 2023, the stolen identity marketplace Genesis Market was shut down by the FBI and a coalition of law enforcement agencies across the globe in "Operation Cookie Monster" . The service traded in "browser fingerprints" which enabled criminals to impersonate victims and access their online services. As many of the impacted accounts did not include email addresses, "8M" is merely an approximation intended to indicate scale.
Other personal data compromised by the service included names, addresses and credit card information, although not all individuals had each of these fields exposed.
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?
8,000,000 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Browser user agent details, Credit card CVV, Credit cards, Dates of birth, Email addresses, Names, Passwords, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Usernames.
What was exposed, and why it matters
- Browser user agent detailsAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
- Credit card CVVAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
- Credit cardsDirectly spendable until the card is cancelled, and card numbers circulate for years after a breach.
- 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.
- NamesTurns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
- 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.
- UsernamesA handle links this account to every other place the same handle is used.
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.
- Check statements for the months after the breach date and ask your bank for a replacement card if the number was full.
- 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 Genesis Market 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 Genesis Market breach?
browser user agent details, credit card cvv, credit cards, dates of birth, email addresses, names, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses, usernames. 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 5 April 2023. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 5 April 2023.
Is the Genesis Market 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?
8,000,000 accounts. That is about 30% 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.