MyRecon OSINT
LimeLeads
On 1 August 2019, LimeLeads was breached. 17,838,396 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, employers, geographic locations. MyRecon rates it 64/100, severe. That is about 66% of the population of Australia.
The story behind the breach
In 2019, the now-defunct B2B marketing leads database service LimeLeads suffered a data breach due to an exposed, unsecured Elasticsearch server. The incident exposed tens of millions of records of largely corporate contact data containing 17.8M unique email addresses, along with phone numbers, employers, job titles and geographic locations including state, city and postcode.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
How did it happen?
In 2019, the now-defunct B2B marketing leads database service LimeLeads suffered a data breach due to an exposed, unsecured Elasticsearch server.
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?
17,838,396 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Email addresses, Employers, Geographic locations, Job titles, Phone numbers.
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.
- Geographic locationsWhere the account was used, which narrows a person down further than most people expect.
- Job titlesIdentifies who has access to what, which is how targets for business email compromise are picked.
- 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 LimeLeads 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 LimeLeads breach?
email addresses, employers, geographic locations, job titles, 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 1 August 2019. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 22 September 2026, a gap of 2609 days during which the data was already out.
Is the LimeLeads 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?
17,838,396 accounts. That is about 66% 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.