71,230 Plaintext Passwords in the Animu Tank Leak Could Unlock More

HEROIC analysts traced a dataset attributed to Animu Tank, a now-defunct U.S. anime and manga community site, to a hacking forum post dated July 1, 2017. The leak contains 71,230 records made up of email addresses and plaintext passwords, still being referenced in credential-stuffing tools years after the fact. Animu Tank never confirmed this incident before going offline, so the attribution is reported rather than verified.

Why This Chained Risk Matters

A single reused password can unlock more than the account it was created for. If your Animu Tank password matches the one on your email, your bank, or a social media account, this leak effectively hands an attacker the keys to all of them at once. Plaintext passwords make that jump immediate, there's no cracking step standing between the leak and an attacker's next login attempt.

What Was Exposed

• Email addresses
• Plaintext passwords

Why This Matters

The site itself is long gone, but the risk isn't. Attackers maintain and trade large archives of old breaches precisely because passwords rarely get changed until something forces the issue. A 71,230-record leak from a niche fan site in 2017 is still valuable today if even a fraction of those users never rotated their passwords.

How This Database Leak Became a Combolist

This incident is tagged as both a Database leak and a Combolist. Attackers extracted Animu Tank's user table directly, and because the passwords were never hashed, the email and password pairs went straight into circulating combolists, plain text files used to automate login attempts across hundreds of other websites at once.

Check If You Are Affected

If you ever had an account on a niche forum or fan site and reused that password elsewhere, this is exactly the kind of leak that keeps that risk alive years later. HEROIC's free breach scanner checks your email against more than 400 billion leaked records and shows you what's been exposed, so you can close the gap before someone else finds it.