Inside the Mix 97 Breach: How 11,553 Records Were Compromised

In August 2018, a dataset from Mix 97, the Canadian FM radio station serving Belleville and the Quinte region of Ontario, was published on a hacking forum. The breach affected 11,553 listener accounts, exposing email addresses along with passwords that had been stored in plaintext. Radio station websites are rarely thought of as high-value targets, but this breach shows that any platform collecting user registrations is storing data that attackers will take if given the chance.

Why This Is Dangerous

Storing passwords in plaintext is one of the more serious mistakes a website can make, because it means an attacker who accesses the database does not need to crack or guess anything. The passwords people actually typed when they registered are sitting right there in the stolen file. Listeners who signed up for a Mix 97 account likely used the same email and password combination they use elsewhere, turning this local breach into a set of working keys for accounts on much larger platforms.

What Was Exposed

• Email Addresses
• Plaintext Passwords

Why This Matters

Regional media organizations hold a trusted place in their communities, and listeners who created accounts to enter contests or engage with local content did not expect that trust to end in a data breach. Beyond the reputational harm, the practical risk is the same as with any credential leak: a reused password from this breach can be tested against email providers, banking apps, and other platforms, and even a small percentage of successful logins adds up to real account takeovers.

How Combolist Breaches Work

A combolist breach typically starts with the theft of a database, often through an SQL injection vulnerability, an exposed database port, or compromised administrator credentials. Once an attacker has the data, they extract the user table and convert it into a simple list pairing each email address with its password, which is exactly the kind of file that ended up shared on a hacking forum after the Mix 97 breach. These lists are then fed into automated tools that test each pair against popular login pages, often across many unrelated platforms at once.

Check If You Are Affected

If you ever created an account on the Mix 97 website to enter a contest or access listener content, your credentials may be part of this breach. Use HEROIC's free breach checker at heroic.com to scan your email address against more than 400 billion records from known breaches. If you get a hit, change any account that shares that password right away.