The KMITL Breach Gave Hackers 8,089 SHA-1 Password Hashes to Crack

HEROIC analysts traced a dataset tied to King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), a major public university in Bangkok, back to a database compromise dated August 26, 2018. The breach exposed 8,089 records, each pairing a university email address with a SHA-1 password hash. The data was later distributed as a combolist, a format built to make stolen credentials easy to test against other sites in bulk.

Why the KMITL Breach Is Dangerous

SHA-1 is an older hashing algorithm that is now considered weak by modern security standards. With today's computing power and cracking tools, attackers can run large batches of SHA-1 hashes through brute-force or dictionary attacks and recover a meaningful share of the original passwords, especially any that were short or commonly used.

What Was Exposed

• Email addresses
• SHA-1 password hashes

Why This Matters

Once a SHA-1 hash from this dataset is cracked, the attacker holds a working KMITL email and password combination. If any of the 8,089 people in this breach reused that same password for a personal email account, banking site, or social media profile, attackers can use it in credential stuffing attempts against those services too. That is how a university credential leak can turn into account takeover or identity theft well outside the school's own systems.

How Database and Combolist Breaches Work

A database breach happens when attackers gain unauthorized access to an organization's stored user records, in this case KMITL's login data, and copy it out. From there, the stolen records are often reformatted into a combolist, a simple file of email and password pairs designed to be fed directly into automated tools that attempt logins across many websites at once. This is how a single university breach can end up powering attacks against completely unrelated accounts.

Check If You Are Affected

If you had a KMITL account or simply want to know whether your email and password have appeared in a breach, HEROIC's free breach scanner checks your details against a database of more than 400 billion leaked records in seconds.