How Hunter Skill Recruitment’s Reported Breach Leaked 845 Logins
HEROIC analysts reportedly traced a file back to Hunter Skill Recruitment, a staffing and recruitment platform, containing 845 records of email addresses paired with plaintext passwords dated to August 2023. The quickest way to know whether your job search history is part of this is to scan your email.
What Was Exposed
Key finding100% of records pair an email address with a password.
Why a Reported Recruitment Leak Carries Extra Risk
Recruitment accounts often connect a real name, phone number, and work history to one login. An attacker who can read a plaintext password straight out of this file does not need to guess anything to get inside that profile.
What Reportedly Showed Up in This Hunter Skill Recruitment File
- Email addresses: confirms a working contact point an attacker can target directly.
- Plaintext passwords: readable immediately, giving an attacker instant access without cracking anything.
How This Could Play Out for a Job Seeker
An attacker could log into the account, pull contact details and resume history, and send fraudulent job offers that look convincing because they come from inside a real recruitment profile. The same password, if reused, can also open doors into banking or email accounts. A fraudulent job offer sent from inside a trusted platform is often enough to convince someone to hand over even more personal information down the line.
Were You Part of the Hunter Skill Recruitment File?
Scan your email to see whether your address was part of this reported leak. If it was, change your Hunter Skill Recruitment password and change it on any other account where you used the same one. This applies equally whether you used a personal or a work email.
Data exposed in this breach
Email addresses appear in 100% of the 845 records in this breach, alongside plain-text passwords (100%). 100% of records (845) pair an email address with a password.
An email address and password together are a working login. Attackers feed pairs like these into automated tools that try them on banking, shopping and email sites, so anyone who reused the password elsewhere is exposed there too.
- Domain
- hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk
- Date leaked
- 01 Aug 2023
- Records in breach
- 845
Email providers and account types
0% of the email addresses in this breach are personal mailboxes and 100% are work addresses.
Work addresses matter because a password reused on a company account can give attackers a way into that organisation. The company domains below show which employers appear most often.
Mailbox type
- Personal mailboxes0%
- Work mailboxes100%
Company domains
| # | Domain | Accounts | Share of records |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | hunterskill.aplitrak.com | 838 | 99.2% |
| 2 | hunterskill.com | 7 | 0.8% |
Password Analysis
Key finding99.9% of passwords in this breach are reused.
Password strength
Of the 845 passwords analysed, 99.9% appear more than once, and the single most common password accounts for 100% of them. The average password is 10 characters long.
Password habits
Password length
The most common length is 9-10 characters, covering 100% of passwords.
Every extra character multiplies the number of guesses an attacker needs. Passwords of 8 characters or fewer can be cracked quickly once they leak, while long passphrases hold up far better.
Share of passwords by length
Most common passwords
The most common password appears 845 times. Passwords are masked here: only their first characters are shown, next to each password's true length.
When many accounts share one password it usually points to a default password, a shared team password or a common pattern such as a name followed by numbers. Treat any password on this list as public.
- 1st********10 chars845
Leaked in this breach: email address, plaintext password
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Threat Intelligence
Key finding29 records from hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk staff appear in 12 other breaches.
How a Reported Breach Like This Typically Starts and Spreads
It typically starts with a copy of the recruitment platform's own stored account records being taken from its systems rather than individual users. From there, the file is usually posted to a forum first and then re-shared across messaging channels.
Employees of hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk in other breaches
29 records from hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk staff turn up in 12 other breaches. The most common sources are Collection #1, XSS.IS Combolist and Misc Combolists.
70.6% of these staff passwords are reused, so a password leaked in one of these breaches may still open a work account. Organisations in this position should reset passwords for the affected addresses and require multi-factor authentication.
Company staff exposure
Other breaches with staff records
- 10Mix uploaded by a Telegram User1
Staff email addresses
- 1s*****n@hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk10
- 2r*****b@hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk6
- 3b*****y@hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk5
- 4r*****s@hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk4
- 5b*****e@hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk3
- 6r*****t@hunterskillrecruitment.co.uk1
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