If You Reuse Passwords, the AIM.com Leak Should Worry You

HEROIC's threat intelligence team identified a large stealer log collection labeled AIM.COM BASE 0925 being distributed on Telegram. Dated February 2023, this dataset focuses on AIM.com email users and contains 338,518 records including email addresses, plaintext passwords, and URLs of websites where these credentials were entered by victims of infostealer malware.

Legacy Email Passwords in Plaintext Are Easy Prey

All 338,518 passwords in this dump are stored in plaintext—no encryption, no hashing, no protection of any kind. AIM.com email addresses are particularly vulnerable because many users created these accounts years ago with simpler passwords and then reused those same credentials across newer services. Attackers understand that legacy email passwords often serve as a master key to a person's entire digital history, including password reset flows for other accounts.

What Was Exposed

• Email Addresses — AIM.com accounts and associated email identifiers
• Plaintext Passwords — unencrypted credentials stored exactly as users entered them
• URLs — login pages for various online services tied to these credentials

Why Password Reusers Face the Greatest Danger

If you ever used your AIM.com email password on another service—even once—this leak puts those accounts at risk. Credential stuffing attacks are specifically designed to exploit this behavior. Attackers take the 338,518 email-password pairs and test them against hundreds of popular platforms including banking sites, shopping portals, social media, and email providers. Since many people carry old passwords forward for years, the success rate for these attacks against legacy email credentials tends to be higher than average.

Stealer Logs: The Hidden Malware Threat

This breach traces back to infostealer malware infections across thousands of individual devices. Malware variants like RedLine, Raccoon, or Vidar silently infiltrate systems through phishing attacks, malicious browser extensions, or pirated software. Once active, they harvest every credential stored in the victim's web browser—including long-forgotten logins to legacy services like AIM.com. The extracted data is organized into log files and distributed through underground channels, where it is eventually compiled into large themed collections like this one.

Check If Your Credentials Were Exposed

HEROIC's breach intelligence database includes over 400 billion records from data breaches, stealer logs, and dark web monitoring. Use HEROIC's free breach scanner to find out if your AIM.com email or any other account appears in this dump or other known leaks. If your credentials are compromised, change the affected password everywhere it was used, adopt unique passwords for each account using a password manager, and enable two-factor authentication on all critical services.