MyRecon OSINT
SoundCloud
On 15 December 2025, SoundCloud was breached. 29,815,722 accounts were exposed, including avatars, email addresses, geographic locations. MyRecon rates it 58/100, serious. That is roughly everyone in Australia.
Nothing in this breach was secret. Display names, avatars, follower counts and countries were all public on the platform, and the email addresses were not. The attacker's entire contribution was joining the two, for roughly a fifth of the user base.
That join is the product. A handle chosen precisely because it is not your name is worth very little on its own; attached to a mailbox you actually read, it becomes an identity and a delivery channel at the same time. Artists who released work under an alias and listeners whose taste they would rather not have attributed to them are in the same file, and no amount of care about what they posted would have kept them out of it, the private half came from the account system, not from anything they published.
The practical exposure is phishing with an unusually good hook. A message quoting your real handle, your follower count and your country reads exactly like the platform, and the platform is precisely who a working musician expects to hear from about payouts, copyright claims and takedowns. Open the app and look; do not follow the link, however specific the message is about a track you genuinely uploaded.
What happened
In December 2025, SoundCloud announced it had discovered unauthorised activity on its platform. The incident allowed an attacker to map publicly available SoundCloud profile data to email addresses for approximately 20% of its users. The impacted data included 30M unique email addresses, names, usernames, avatars, follower and following counts and, in some cases, the user’s country. The attackers later attempted to extort SoundCloud before publicly releasing the data the following month.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Read the original disclosure ↗
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
- AvatarsAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
- Geographic locationsWhere the account was used, which narrows a person down further than most people expect.
- NamesTurns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
- Profile statisticsAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
- UsernamesA handle links this account to every other place the same handle is used.
What to do if you were in it
- 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 SoundCloud 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 SoundCloud breach?
avatars, email addresses, geographic locations, names, profile statistics, 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 15 December 2025. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 27 January 2026, a gap of 43 days during which the data was already out.
Is the SoundCloud 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?
29,815,722 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Australia. That is accounts rather than people, one person often has several.
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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.