MyRecon OSINT
Hjedd
On 18 July 2022, Hjedd was breached. 13,204,029 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, ip addresses, passwords. MyRecon rates it 77/100, severe. That is about 49% of the population of Australia.
The passwords here were stored as bcrypt hashes, which is the right answer, slow by design, salted per record, still holding up. It makes almost no difference to the people in this file, because the password was never the damaging part. The damaging part is an email address appearing next to the name of an adult website.
That is what the sensitive flag on this entry means, and why those entries behave unlike the rest of the archive. Everywhere else, exposure creates a task you can complete: change this, freeze that, watch a statement. Here the harm is the disclosure itself, and disclosure has no undo. A password can be rotated. Membership of a site cannot be un-leaked, and the IP addresses alongside it narrow down where the account was used.
The predictable consequence is extortion mail, and knowing where the accurate details came from is what defuses it. A message quoting the real site name, sometimes a real old password, is designed to make the rest of the claim credible, and the rest of the claim is invented. There are no recordings; there is a breach file with your address in it, bought for a few dollars. Replying or paying proves the mailbox is live, and that is the only thing the sender learns.
What happened
In July 2022, the Chinese adult website Hjedd was found to be leaking more than 13M customer records which subsequently appeared on a popular hacking forum. The exposed data included email and IP addresses, usernames and passwords stored as bcrypt hashes.
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.
- IP addressesApproximate location at the time of use, and a way to correlate accounts across services.
- PasswordsAnyone reusing this password elsewhere has those accounts exposed too, credential stuffing is automated and tries them all within days.
- 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.
- 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 Hjedd 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 Hjedd breach?
email addresses, ip addresses, passwords, 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 18 July 2022. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 5 October 2023, a gap of 444 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Hjedd 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?
13,204,029 accounts. That is about 49% 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.