Picture This: Your Hotmail Password in a 25,523-Record Leak

HEROIC analysts uncovered a combolist called "hotmail 10.11 uploaded by a Telegram User" dating back to December 24, 2022. The file holds 25,523 records, each one an email address, largely Hotmail accounts, paired with a plaintext password and a linked URL.

Why This Hotmail 10.11 Combolist Is Dangerous

Picture this: you type your Hotmail password into your inbox one morning while, on the other side of a screen somewhere, that exact same password is sitting in a plaintext file alongside your email address and a link to the account it unlocks. With 25,523 records in this list, that scenario is not hypothetical for a meaningful number of Hotmail users, it is the reality of what this combolist makes possible.

What Was Exposed

• Email addresses (largely Hotmail accounts)
• Plaintext passwords
• URLs linked to the accounts

Why This Matters

A list of this size gives attackers plenty of raw material for credential stuffing, automatically testing each email and password combination against banking sites, shopping accounts, and social media logins. Anyone whose Hotmail credentials appear here is at risk of having that account taken over directly, and if the same password was reused elsewhere, the damage can spread into identity theft and financial fraud.

How Combolists Work

A combolist is a compiled text file of login credentials, often labeled with batch numbers like "10.11" to track different releases from the same source. This one circulated through Telegram, where combolists are frequently bought, sold, and shared. Because the passwords were already stored in plaintext, no decryption or cracking stood between the file and anyone looking to use the credentials inside it.

Check If You Are Affected

If you have a Hotmail account, or any email address, it is worth checking whether your information is part of this leak. HEROIC's free breach scanner searches a database of more than 400 billion leaked records, including combolists, stealer logs, and database dumps like this one, so you can find out fast and change any password that is still at risk.