Your Hotmail Inbox Could Be Exposed: 4,984-Record Combo Leak

HEROIC analysts found a combolist named "Hotmail Combo" uploaded to Telegram, tied to a leak dated 10 December 2024. The file contains 4,984 records pairing Hotmail email addresses with plaintext passwords and the URLs those accounts were logged into.

Why This Is Dangerous

Picture someone opening this file and running each of the 4,984 email and password pairs against Outlook, banking sites, and shopping accounts within minutes, since the passwords are stored in plaintext and need no cracking. If your Hotmail password shows up here and you have used it anywhere else, that account is now the weakest link in your entire online life.

What Was Exposed

• Hotmail email addresses
• Plaintext passwords
• URLs tied to the original login pages

Why This Matters

A Hotmail account is often the recovery email for banking, shopping, and social media logins, so gaining access to it can let an attacker reset passwords elsewhere. Combined with credential stuffing tools that test the same password across many sites, a single exposed pair from this list can snowball into account takeover, identity theft, and financial fraud.

How Combolists Work

A combolist is a plain text file of email and password pairs, usually gathered from older leaks, phishing kits, or malware infections and then filtered by provider, in this case Hotmail, before being packaged for sale or sharing on platforms like Telegram. Sorting by provider makes the list faster for attackers to use against a specific type of account.

Check If You Are Affected

Use HEROIC's free breach scanner to check whether your Hotmail address appears in this combolist or anywhere across HEROIC's database of more than 400 billion breached records. If it does, change that password immediately and enable two-factor authentication on your Microsoft account.