Exactis 2018 Data Breach
Data Broker · Consumer and business data aggregation, marketing data, and profiling · Marketing data broker and analytics provider · USA
Exactis Marketing Data Broker Breach: 110M Consumer Profiles Including Income, Religion & Ethnicity
Marketing data broker (defunct)
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
65/100
Lower riskHigher risk
High and current: recent, valuable data circulating on the dark web now.
Data Sensitivity i
RestrictedBeing associated with this breach can itself be harmful. Disclosure is limited and presence is not confirmed to unverified parties.
110.0MRecords
2018Year
The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.
Crucial data exposed
FinancialCredit Status; Investment Information
AddressPhysical address
Breach Summary
Exactis, a Florida-based marketing data broker, exposed a database of roughly 340 million consumer and business records in June 2018 after leaving it publicly accessible due to a misconfiguration. Security researcher Vinny Troia of Night Lion Security discovered the leak, which spanned multiple terabytes across hundreds of data fields. No external attacker was required. The data was simply open on the internet. Around 110 million individuals are confirmed affected, with a subset of 132 million unique email addresses later added to the public breach notification service Have I Been Pwned. The exposed records were unusually detailed for a data breach. Beyond names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses, the dataset included dates of birth, income levels, net worth, financial investments, home ownership status, family structure, marital status, religion, ethnicity, spoken languages, education levels, occupations, and personal interests. Exactis compiled and sold this kind of profiling data to businesses for marketing and targeting purposes. Its exposure creates serious risk for affected individuals, including identity theft, phishing attacks tailored with personal details, and misuse by people-search services or other data aggregators. No major regulatory action or class-action settlement has been publicly confirmed in connection with this breach. Because Exactis collected data on people who never directly interacted with the company, many affected individuals had no way of knowing their information was held there in the first place. Anyone who may be included should be alert to targeted phishing attempts and consider monitoring their credit and identity for signs of misuse.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
110.0M records analyzed
About Exactis
Exactis was a Florida-based marketing data broker and profiling company that described itself as a compiler and aggregator of premium business and consumer data. Its business model centered on collecting, structuring, and licensing large volumes of consumer and business records for profiling, segmentation, marketing, and sales use cases.
Why They Hold Your Data
Marketing data brokers aggregate consumer and business identity, contact, demographic, behavioral, and profiling data across advertising, analytics, and enrichment workflows.
Recent Developments
Exactis’ public corporate profile appears to have largely collapsed after the 2018 exposure. Reporting in 2019 described the company as effectively finished as a business after customers and partners pulled away, and there is little visible evidence today of a meaningful operating presence beyond legacy references and dormant company information.
Data Points Exposed
19 verified field types
Credit Status High
Date of Birth High
Education Information
Email Address
Ethnicity Or Race
Family Structure
Financial Profile
Full Name
Gender
Homeownership Status
Investment Information High
IP Address
Job Information
Personal Interests
Phone Number
Physical address High
Relationship Status
Religion
Spoken Language
Breach Impact
The Exactis breach was especially serious because it exposed one of the richest broker-style profiling datasets ever left open on the public internet. Public breach tracking says the leak involved 340 million records and a subset containing 131.6 million unique email addresses, with hundreds of fields spanning names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, income levels, family structure, net worth, interests, religion, and other profiling data, making the corpus highly useful for phishing, fraud pretexting, identity linkage, enrichment, and large-scale targeting.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Financial fraud using exposed financial profile data | • Identity verification bypass using name + date of birth combination | • SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure | • Employment-based social engineering using job and employer data
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A data-broker/identity breach: aggregated identity attributes re-seed broker networks and enrich targeting of the individual. For a high-profile principal this is targeting-grade, not merely identity-theft-grade: the combination lets an adversary locate, impersonate, or pressure the principal with little additional work.
What You Should Do
- Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
- Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
- Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.
How ObscureIQ Can Help
- Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
- Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
Protect Yourself
Protect Yourself: Limited Disclosure
Check If You’re Affected: Verification Required
Because being associated with this breach can itself be harmful, we do not confirm whether anyone appears in it to unverified parties. Verify your identity to privately check whether your own data appears in this breach or related indexes.
We will only reveal whether a specific person appears in this breach to that person.
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