One Italian Classifieds Site. 41,889 Plaintext Passwords. The Annunci-Gratuiti Breach.

HEROIC analysts flagged the Annunci-Gratuiti breach while reviewing a batch of Italian-language credential dumps circulating on underground forums. The breach occured in November 2017 and affected Annunci-Gratuiti, an Italian online classifieds board. Nearly 42,000 user records were exposed, and what made this breach stand out was that the passwords were stored in plaintext, meaning they were never encrypted or hashed at all. Any attacker who got hold of this database could read every password directly, with zero effort required.

Why Plaintext Passwords From a Classifieds Site Are a Major Threat

When a site stores passwords in plaintext and suffers a breach, attackers do not need any technical skill to exploit the data. They simply read the passwords and start testing them on other websites. Email and password combinations from a site like Annunci-Gratuiti are recieved by criminals and immediately fed into automated tools that try those same credentials on banking apps, email providers, and social media. Because many people use the same password everywhere, a breach from one small site can unlock accounts across a person's entire digital life.

What Was Exposed in the Annunci-Gratuiti Breach

• Email Address
• Plaintext Password

Why an Italian Classifieds Breach From 2017 Is Still a Risk Today

Old breach data does not lose its value to criminals. Annunci-Gratuiti user records from 2017 continue to appear on breach aggregation sites and dark web marketplaces, often bundled with other Italian-language leaks. If you registered on the site and used that same password anywhere else, you remain at risk today. Credential stuffing attacks, account takeover, and identity theft can all result from someone finding your plaintext password in an old database dump. The longer you wait to change reused passwords, the longer that window of vulnerability stays open.

How a Database Breach Works

A database breach happens when an attacker gains unauthorized access to a website's backend and copies out the stored user data. For a classifieds board like Annunci-Gratuiti, that database holds every registered user's account details. If the site failed to encrypt passwords, those credentials are readable the moment the database is copied. The stolen data is then uploaded to hacking forums or sold privately, where other criminals can download and use it for their own attacks. The original site may not even discover the breach for months.

Check If Your Data Was Exposed

HEROIC provides a free breach scanner backed by more than 400 billion exposed records from data leaks around the world. You can search your email address right now to find out whether it appeared in the Annunci-Gratuiti breach or any other known incident. Use HEROIC's free tool today and take control of your online security.