MyRecon OSINT
Hathway
On 17 December 2023, Hathway was breached. 4,670,080 accounts were exposed, including device information, email addresses, ip addresses. MyRecon rates it 69/100 — severe. That is about 17% of the population of Australia.
The field that makes this one worse than its size suggests is the last one in the list: support ticket logs. Every other data class here is structured — a name goes in the name box, an address in the address box. A support ticket is whatever the customer typed while frustrated, which routinely includes account numbers, alternate phone numbers, details about who else lives at the address, and often a password, because people paste them in when asked to describe the problem.
An internet provider also holds a category of data almost nobody else does: the link between a person, a physical address and an IP address over time. That mapping is what turns an IP address found elsewhere into a name, and it is the single most useful record an ISP keeps from an investigative point of view.
For Indian subscribers specifically, the practical risk that follows is the support call that already knows your plan, your address and your last complaint. That is not a coincidence and it is not the provider calling.
What happened
In December 2023, hundreds of gigabytes of data allegedly taken from Indian ISP and digital TV provider Hathway appeared on a popular hacking website. The incident exposed extensive personal information including 4.7M unique email addresses along with names, physical and IP addresses, phone numbers, password hashes and support ticket logs.
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
- Device informationFingerprints a device across services and helps an attacker imitate a trusted login.
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target — expect more phishing, better aimed.
- IP addressesApproximate location at the time of use, and a way to correlate accounts across services.
- 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.
- SalutationsAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
- Support ticketsAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
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 Hathway 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 Hathway breach?
device information, email addresses, ip addresses, names, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses, salutations, support tickets. 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 17 December 2023. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 12 January 2024, a gap of 26 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Hathway 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?
4,670,080 accounts. That is about 17% of the population of Australia. That is accounts rather than people — one person often has several.
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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.