high severity October 26, 2017 · 3 min read

MyHeritage — 92 Million Genealogy Accounts, Found by a Researcher Seven Months Later (2017)

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

The genealogy site lost email addresses and salted SHA-1 hashes in October 2017 and did not learn about it until a researcher found the file and told them, seven months later. No DNA data and no family trees were in it — a point worth stating plainly, because the opposite is widely assumed.

A family tree beside an account credential

What happened

In October 2017 the genealogy website MyHeritage suffered a breach exposing more than 92 million customer records containing email addresses and salted SHA-1 password hashes. The incident was reported seven months later, after a security researcher discovered the file and contacted the company. In 2019 the data appeared for sale on a dark-web marketplace among the GnosticPlayers batches and began circulating more widely.

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What was not in it

Start here, because the assumption runs the other way and the correction matters. No DNA data was exposed. No family trees were exposed. No payment details were exposed. The catalogue lists two data classes: email addresses and passwords.

This distinction is not a technicality. A genetic-data breach would be permanent and would implicate blood relatives who never used the service. This was a credential breach at a company that happens to hold genetic data — serious, but a different order of problem. Pages that blur the two frighten readers about a harm that did not occur while under-serving the one that did.

Salted SHA-1, and seven months of silence

The hashes were salted, so mass cracking across the whole set was not possible; but SHA-1 is fast, so weak passwords fell to targeted attempts. The realistic reading is the same as for Zynga: guessable passwords are gone, long random ones held.

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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 sample580 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.

Report details & sourcing

Severity High contact details only, none of them permanent

Disclosed October 26, 2017

Last reviewed July 22, 2026

Affected 92.0M customer records

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.

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