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2022 · Data breach

QuestionPro

Breached 21 May 2022 · Published 5 August 2022 · questionpro.com

22,229,637Accounts exposed
52/100Serious severity
4Types of data
VerifiedBy HIBP

On 21 May 2022, QuestionPro was breached. 22,229,637 accounts were exposed, including browser user agent details, email addresses, ip addresses. MyRecon rates it 52/100 — serious. That is about 82% of the population of Australia.

Checked against this breach and every other on record, against public breach data only. Your address is not sent to us as a form and is not stored — it is handed straight to the lookup tool in your own browser. See the privacy policy.

"Survey results" is the quietest data class in this archive and one of the most revealing. People answer surveys candidly precisely because they believe the answers are aggregated and anonymous. Tie those answers back to an email address and an IP address, as this data does, and the assumption that made them candid is the thing that makes the file valuable.

The employee engagement survey, the health questionnaire, the political polling, the customer satisfaction form that asked why you left — all of it is opinion given under an expectation of distance from the person holding it.

Worth noting too how this record's status changed. It sat flagged as unverified because the company would not confirm a breach, and the flag was removed only after people found their own accurate records in it. A company declining to confirm does not make a dataset false, and the verification eventually came from the people in it rather than from the organisation holding it.

What happened

In May 2022, the survey website QuestionPro was the target of an extortion attempt relating to an alleged data breach. Over 100GB of data containing 22M unique email addresses (some of which appear to be generated by the platform), are alleged to have been extracted from the service along with IP addresses, browser user agents and results relating to surveys. QuestionPro would not confirm whether a breach had occurred (although they did confirm they were the target of an extortion attempt), so the data was initially flagged as "unverified". Subsequent verification by impacted HIBP subscribers later led to the removal of the unverified flag.

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

What to do if you were in it

  1. 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 QuestionPro 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 QuestionPro breach?

browser user agent details, email addresses, ip addresses, survey results. 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 21 May 2022. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 5 August 2022, a gap of 76 days during which the data was already out.

Is the QuestionPro 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?

22,229,637 accounts. That is about 82% of the population of Australia. That is accounts rather than people — one person often has several.

Read next

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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.

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