Charter data breach: 4.9M accounts exposed
Severity: medium · Patch status: no-fix-needed · Since 2026-05-28
In May 2026, the telecommunications company Charter Communications (the parent company behind the consumer broadband and cable brand Spectrum) was named by the ShinyHunters group in a "pay or leak" extortion campaign. The group later published the data, which exposed 4.9M unique email addresses along with names, phone numbers and physical addresses. A subset of approximately 85k records originating from an internal employee directory also included job titles. Charter confirmed the incident, but stated that no sensitive personal information or customer proprietary network information (CPNI) was exfiltrated. Exposed data: email addresses, job titles, names, phone numbers, physical addresses. The breach dates from May 23, 2026; Have I Been Pwned loaded it on May 28, 2026.
What to do
- If you had a Charter account, change its password and the password of any other account that reused it.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
- Check whether your addresses are in this breach at https://haveibeenpwned.com.
- Expect targeted phishing that quotes the leaked details; verify any unexpected contact out of band.
Sources
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