The Sons of Liberty Tees Leak: 88,000 Plaintext Passwords Exposed

HEROIC analysts tracked a dataset tied to Sons of Liberty Tees, a now-defunct U.S. apparel retailer, back to a leak first posted on a hacking forum on March 20, 2019. The dataset contains 87,929 records pairing email addresses with plaintext passwords. Although the breach itself dates back several years, the data continues to circulate and gets recycled into newer combolists, which is why it's still worth checking today.

Why This Is Dangerous

Plaintext passwords are the worst-case scenario in any leak. There's no hashing or encryption to crack, no guessing involved, just a working password sitting next to its matching email address. Anyone who reused that same password on another account, a bank, an email provider, a social media profile, is exposed the moment this file is downloaded.

What Was Exposed

• Email addresses
• Plaintext passwords

Why This Matters

This is a textbook setup for credential stuffing, where attackers take a leaked email and password pair and try it against dozens of other websites automatically. Because the passwords here were never hashed, they work immediately without any extra effort. If you've reused a Sons of Liberty Tees password anywhere else, even years after the original breach, that account is still at risk today.

How Database and Combolist Leaks Work

This incident is tagged as both a database breach and a combolist. That means the original data was likely pulled directly from the retailer's customer database, then later repackaged into a combolist, a plain text file that combines emails and passwords from one or more sources into a single list attackers can run through automated login tools. Combolists are traded and re-traded for years after the original breach, often long after the company that lost the data has shut down, which is exactly what appears to have happened here.

Check If You Are Affected

Old breaches don't expire, especially when passwords were never hashed to begin with. If you ever shopped with Sons of Liberty Tees or reuse passwords across sites, run your email through HEROIC's free breach scanner, which checks against more than 400 billion leaked records, to see if this or any other exposure affects you.