Skip to content
Back to Blog
high severity December 17, 2019 · 1 min read

Avvo Data Breach (2019)

If you are a customer of Avvo, here’s what’s now in circulation.

In approximately December 2019, an alleged data breach of the lawyer directory service Avvo was published to an online hacking forum and used in an extortion scam (it's possible the exposure dates back earlier than that). The data contained 4.1M unique email addresses alongside SHA-1 hashes, most likely representing user passwords. Multiple attempts at contacting Avvo over the course of a week were unsuccessful and the authenticity of the data was eventually verified with common Avvo and HIBP subscribers.

Avvo Data Breach (2019)

What the free scan actually returns

Sample resultyou@email.comIllustrative — not a real person

Found on people-search siteswe remove these

These listings are live, public, and legal to remove — and removing them is what we do.

value redacted in this sampleage, relatives, address historySpokeo
value redacted in this samplephone, household, property recordsBeenVerified
value redacted in this sample582 companies checked

Found in breach recordsverifiedreported — unverified

Each record is labeled: confirmed breach data, or an attacker’s claim no one has verified.

verifiedvalue redacted in this samplepassword + phone · 2024telecom breach
unverifiedvalue redacted in this sampleclaimed in ransomware listing · 2026leak-site claim

Leaked data cannot be deleted from the internet — anyone claiming otherwise is lying. Broker listings can be removed. We do the second, and show you exactly what to fix from the first.

Were you a Avvo customer?
Avvo is one listing. Your email is probably in others.
4.1M accounts were exposed here. Check whether yours is one — and find every other leak tied to the same address, in about 15 seconds. No account, no card.

By running your scan you agree to the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy, and to GalaxyWarden emailing you the results of this scan.

Report details & sourcing

Severity High
Disclosed December 17, 2019
Last reviewed July 22, 2026
Affected 4.1M
Data exposed Email addressesPasswords
By GalaxyWarden Threat Research · Editorial & sourcing standards
Editorial & sourcing policy
GalaxyWarden is a breach-monitoring service and news aggregator. We do not exfiltrate, host, purchase, or redistribute stolen data. Breach information is compiled from publicly accessible sources and threat-intelligence platforms, and is reported as claims attributed to their source. We promptly correct or remove material shown to be inaccurate — see our content & takedown policy or write to support@galaxywarden.com.
Sources: Have I Been Pwned
Share this Post on X Reddit Email

Related breaches

critical September 01, 2019

Zynga — 173 Million Words With Friends Accounts (2019)

The maker of Words With Friends lost 173 million accounts with salted SHA-1 passwords and, unusually…
high May 24, 2019

Canva — 137 Million Accounts, and Why "Passwords Exposed" Overstates It (2019)

Canva hashed with bcrypt, and many users had no password at all because they signed in with Google o…
high February 25, 2019

Verifications.io — 763 Million Email Records Left on an Open Database (2019)

An email-validation firm most people had never heard of left 763 million records in a MongoDB instan…