MyRecon OSINT
Tokopedia
On 17 April 2020, Tokopedia was breached. 71,443,698 accounts were exposed, including dates of birth, email addresses, genders. MyRecon rates it 80/100, critical. That is roughly everyone in the United Kingdom.
Seventy-one million accounts at Indonesia's largest online marketplace. At that share of a national population a breach stops behaving like a corporate incident and starts behaving like a demographic dataset, names, genders and dates of birth for a substantial part of the country's online public, in one file, freely circulating.
The passwords were stored as SHA2-384 hashes, and the number in that name does more harm than good. SHA-2 is not a broken algorithm; it is the wrong kind of algorithm for this job. It is built to be fast, and for password storage speed is the defect, the whole point of bcrypt, scrypt and Argon2 is to be deliberately, tunably slow, so that an attacker with the file cannot test billions of guesses a second. A reassuring hash name is one of the most reliable ways to be wrong about password security.
Assume anything short or guessable in that file was recovered years ago, and change it anywhere it was reused. The other half of the record never expires and never gets rotated: a name, a gender and a date of birth do not change, and a date of birth is one of the three details call centres still accept as proof that the person on the line is who they say they are.
What happened
In April 2020, Indonesia's largest online store Tokopedia suffered a data breach. The incident resulted in 15M rows of data being posted to a popular hacking forum. An additional 76M rows were later provided to HIBP in July 2020. In total, the data included over 71M unique email addresses alongside names, genders, birth dates and passwords stored as SHA2-384 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
- Dates of birthOne of the three things call centres ask to verify identity, and it never changes.
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
- GendersSmall on its own; useful to anyone assembling a fuller profile.
- 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.
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 Tokopedia 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 Tokopedia breach?
dates of birth, email addresses, genders, names, passwords. 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 17 April 2020. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 2 May 2020, a gap of 16 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Tokopedia 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?
71,443,698 accounts. That is roughly everyone in the United Kingdom. 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.