START data breach: 7.5M accounts exposed
Severity: high · Patch status: no-fix-needed · Since 2022-08-30
In August 2022, news broke of an attack against the Russian streaming service "START". The incident led to the exposure of 44M records containing 7.4M unique email addresses. The impacted data also included the subscriber's country and password hash. START subsequently acknowledged the incident in a Telegram post and stated that the data dated back to 2021. Exposed data: email addresses, geographic locations, names, passwords. The breach dates from Jun 1, 2021; Have I Been Pwned loaded it on Aug 30, 2022.
What to do
- If you had a START 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
All live incidents on Threat Watch