TimePad Leaked 8,946 Accounts, Including Unsalted MD5 Passwords

HEROIC analysts confirmed the TimePad database breach while reviewing a batch of Russian-language data dumps circulating on underground forums. TimePad, an event registration and ticketing platform based in Russia operating at timepad.ru, had 8,946 user accounts exposed in a breach that occured in August 2016. The database dump included MD5-hashed passwords stored without salting, a practice that makes them accessable to cracking through standard rainbow table lookups. Though smaller in scale than many breaches, the structured nature of the leak and the crackability of the password format make it an ongoing threat.

Why Unsalted MD5 Passwords From TimePad Are Still Crackable Today

MD5 passwords stored without a salt are among the easiest credentials for attackers to crack. A salt is a random value added to each password before hashing, which makes precomputed attack tables useless. Without it, an attacker can simply look up the MD5 hash in a rainbow table and instantly recieved the original plaintext password. This means that for many TimePad users, their exact original password is already known to anyone who purchased or downloaded this database dump.

What Was Exposed in the TimePad Breach

• User account records (8,946 total)
• Email addresses
• Usernames
• Unsalted MD5-hashed passwords

How Credential Reuse Turns a Small Breach Into a Bigger Problem

With only 8,946 records, the TimePad breach is small by modern standards. But size is not the only measure of danger. Because MD5 passwords here are easily cracked, anyone who used the same password on TimePad as on their email account, bank, or social media is at direct risk of account takeover. Credential stuffing tools can automatically test these recovered passwords across hundreds of platforms in minutes. The risk is seperate from TimePad itself: it lives wherever the user reused that password.

How Database Breaches Work

A database breach happens when an attacker finds a way into a company's data storage systems. For web platforms like TimePad, this typically means exploiting a flaw in the website's code, abusing weak administrator credentials, or taking advantage of a misconfigured server. The attacker downloads the user table, which contains every registered account, and walks away with the data before the company's security team has any indication something went wrong. The breach may not surface publicly for months or even years afterward.

Check If Your Data Was Exposed

HEROIC's free breach scanner covers more than 400 billion records across thousands of known data breaches, including TimePad. Enter your email address at heroic.com/breach-check to find out instantly whether your information was part of this or any other known leak.