Career at Hand’s 2018 Breach: 9,490 MD5 Hashes Still at Risk

Career at Hand's 2018 Breach Left 9,490 MD5 Password Hashes Exposed

HEROIC analysts identified a breach connected to Career at Hand, a now defunct Croatian employment platform, dated August 26, 2018. The exposed dataset contains 9,490 records pairing email addresses with MD5 password hashes. The data was compiled into a database and combolist format and shared on a cybercrime forum.

Why This Is Dangerous

MD5 is a weak, outdated hashing algorithm that can be cracked in bulk using widely available tools and precomputed tables. Even though Career at Hand is no longer operating, the credentials from this leak remain usable today wherever the same email and password combination was reused on other, still-active accounts.

What Was Exposed

• Email addresses
• MD5 password hashes

Why This Matters

A defunct website does not make old credentials harmless. Attackers routinely crack MD5 hashes from years-old breaches and test the resulting email and password pairs against current services in credential stuffing attacks. Anyone who used the same password on Career at Hand and a still-active account risks account takeover, financial fraud, or identity theft long after the original platform disappeared.

How Database and Combolist Breaches Work

A database breach occurs when attackers gain unauthorized access to a website's stored user records and copy them out. That data is frequently reformatted into a combolist, a simplified file of email and password pairs built for automated login testing. When the passwords are hashed with a weak algorithm like MD5, attackers can crack a large share of them offline, turning a years-old breach into a fresh source of working credentials.

Check If You Are Affected

If you ever used Career at Hand, even years ago, it is worth checking whether your email address appears in this leak. HEROIC's free breach scanner searches a database of more than 400 billion leaked records, including this incident, so you can quickly find out and change any passwords you may still be reusing elsewhere.