Breach Database / Zacks

Yes — Zacks was breached.

What happened

In December 2022, the investment research company Zacks announced a data breach. The following month, reports emerged of the incident impacting 820k customers. However, in June 2023, a corpus of data with almost 9M Zacks customers appeared before being broadly circulated on a popular hacking forum. The most recent data was dated May 2020 and included names, usernames, email and physical addresses, phone numbers and passwords stored as unsalted SHA-256 hashes. On disclosure of the larger breach, Zacks advised that in addition to their original report "the unauthorised third parties also gained access to encrypted [sic] passwords of zacks.com customers, but only in the encrypted [sic] format".

What data was exposed

What to do right now

  1. Change your password for this service now. And change it anywhere you reused the same password — attackers try leaked passwords on other sites within hours ("credential stuffing").
  2. Turn on two-factor authentication. Even a leaked password is useless against an account protected by a second factor. Prefer an authenticator app over SMS.
  3. Be alert for smishing and SIM-swap attempts. Treat unexpected texts and "carrier" calls with suspicion; add a PIN/port-freeze with your mobile carrier.
  4. Watch for targeted phishing mail. A leaked home address makes postal and doorstep scams more convincing.
  5. Expect convincing phishing emails. Attackers use breached details to write personalized emails. Be suspicious of any message referencing this service.
  6. Check your other accounts on Have I Been Pwned. Your email address may appear in other breaches you don't know about yet.
  7. Monitor the apps you use going forward. Clearly watches the breach record for the companies behind your apps and alerts you the moment one appears.

Breach data from Have I Been Pwned. Listing here means the service appears in the public breach record — not that your personal data was affected.