MyRecon OSINT
The Post Millennial
On 2 May 2024, The Post Millennial was breached. 56,973,345 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, genders, ip addresses. MyRecon rates it 79/100, severe. That is roughly everyone in Canada.
One headline number, three entirely different populations. A few hundred writers and editors had IP addresses and physical addresses exposed. Tens of thousands of subscribers had names, phone numbers and passwords in plain text. The remainder is a far larger list of email addresses. Averaging those into a single figure hides the fact that the worst outcome here belongs to the smallest group.
The staff exposure is not a fraud problem. Home addresses of named writers, published alongside a defacement of the site itself, is targeting, and that is true of any newsroom's staff whatever the outlet publishes and whoever objects to it. Financial advice does not help with it; the risk is physical, and the remedies are the ones that apply to doxxing rather than to identity theft.
For subscribers, passwords stored in plain text in 2024 means exactly what it says: no hashing failed, because none was attempted. Change that password anywhere it was reused, immediately. And there is a quieter exposure with no remedy at all, appearing on the subscriber list of a political publication discloses something about you that cannot be reset, and that many readers would not have chosen to publish.
What happened
In May 2024, the conservative news website The Post Millennial suffered a data breach. The breach resulted in the defacement of the website and links posted to 3 different corpuses of data including hundreds of writers and editors (IP, physical address and email exposed), tens of thousands of subscribers to the site (name, email, username, phone and plain text password exposed), and tens of millions of email addresses from thousands of mailing lists alleged to have been used by The Post Millennial (this has not been independently verified). The mailing lists appear to be sourced from various campaigns not necessarily run by The Post Millennial and contain a variety of different personal attributes including name, phone and physical address (depending on the campaign). The data was subsequently posted to a popular hacking forum and extensively torrented.
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.
- GendersSmall on its own; useful to anyone assembling a fuller profile.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 The Post Millennial 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 The Post Millennial breach?
email addresses, genders, ip addresses, names, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses, 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 2 May 2024. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 10 May 2024, a gap of 8 days during which the data was already out.
Is the The Post Millennial 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?
56,973,345 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Canada. 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.