The Free Website Visitors Leak Hit More Accounts Than a Small Town

The Free Website Visitors Data Breach: What HEROIC Analysts Found

HEROIC analysts identified a data breach tied to Free Website Visitors, a now defunct US based online marketing platform for website traffic, dating back to August 21, 2018. The exposed dataset contains 11,477 records made up of email addresses and plaintext passwords, which were later found circulating on a prominent hacking forum.

Why Plaintext Passwords Make This Leak an Instant Risk

Because the passwords in this leak were stored and exposed in plaintext rather than hashed or encrypted, anyone who obtains this data can log in immediately, with no cracking required. If you signed up for Free Website Visitors using this email and password, and used that same password on another account, an attacker already holds a working key to try there too.

What Was Exposed in the Free Website Visitors Leak

• Email addresses
• Plaintext passwords
• 11,477 total records affected

Why This Matters Even for a Small Marketing Tool

It is easy to assume a breach at a small online marketing service is low stakes, but the real danger is not the service itself, it is password reuse. Email and password pairs like these are exactly what credential stuffing tools are built for: automatically testing the same login across hundreds of other websites in seconds. If the password from this account matches one used for email, banking, or social media, that single reused password can unlock several accounts at once, leading to account takeover or financial fraud.

How a Database Dump Turns Into a Combolist

This leak is classified as both a database breach and a combolist. The data was most likely pulled directly from Free Website Visitors' own systems through a vulnerability in the site's database, then repackaged into a combolist, a straightforward list of email and password pairs ready for automated login attempts. Combolists are traded on hacking forums because nothing needs to be cracked or decrypted, only tested against other sites where the victim might have reused the same credentials.

Check If Your Email Address Was Part of This Leak

If you have ever created an account on Free Website Visitors or a similar site, it is worth finding out whether your information is part of this or any other breach. HEROIC's free breach scanner checks your email address against a database of more than 400 billion leaked records, including this one, and tells you immediately if you are exposed. If you are, change that password everywhere you have used it and turn on two-factor authentication wherever it is offered.