If You Use Hotmail, This 69,139-Record Leak Should Worry You

HEROIC analysts traced a combolist simply named hotmail.com back to August 2024, when it was uploaded to Telegram by an individual user. The file contains 69,139 records of Hotmail email addresses paired with plaintext passwords and the URLs those logins were used on. Why is this dangerous? With over 69,000 plaintext email and password pairs in one file, an attacker can automate login attempts at scale, and because these are Hotmail addresses, many are likely linked to Microsoft's broader ecosystem of email, cloud storage, and file sharing. Anyone in this file who has reused their password elsewhere is exposed well beyond their inbox. Here is what was exposed in the hotmail.com leak: email addresses, plaintext passwords, and associated URLs. Why this matters: Because Hotmail addresses are often used as a recovery email for other accounts, a compromised login here can give an attacker a path to reset passwords on banking, shopping, and social media accounts tied to the same address. Stolen credentials like these rarely stay in one place. Attackers feed lists like this into automated tools that test each email and password pair against banking sites, email providers, and online retailers, a technique known as credential stuffing. When a password is reused, one exposed account can lead directly to account takeover, identity theft, or financial fraud on completely unrelated services. How a Combolist This Size Gets Built: A file like this is typically assembled by pulling Hotmail-specific credentials out of larger breach collections, phishing results, and malware logs, then merging them into a single domain-focused list. That focus on one email provider makes the 69,139 entries easier for attackers to test in bulk against Microsoft login pages. Check If Your Hotmail Account Is Among the 69,139 Exposed Records: You do not have to wait to find out if your information is part of a leak like this one. HEROIC's free breach scanner checks your email address against a database of more than 400 billion exposed records, including combolists and stealer logs like this one, and tells you immediately if your credentials have shown up in a known breach. If you find a match, change that password right away, and avoid reusing it anywhere else.