MrExcel 2016 Data Breach

MrExcel 2016 Data Breach

Education / Education

MrExcel 2016 Data Breach

An education service in the education sector.

Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
19/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Lower: limited current risk based on data value and recency.
Data Sensitivity i
Standard
Exposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
366KRecords
2016Year

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.

Classification Tags
Education2016

Breach Summary

In December 2016, the forum for the Microsoft Excel tips and solutions site Mr Excel suffered a data breach. The hack of the vBulletin forum led to the exposure of over 366k accounts along with email and IP addresses, dates of birth and salted passwords hashed with MD5. The owner of the MrExcel forum subsequently self-submitted the data to HIBP.

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…

366K records analyzed

About MrExcel

MrExcel is an education service in the education sector.

Why They Hold Your Data

MrExcel is an education service in the education sector. Services like this typically hold activity history, dates of birth, email addresses, IP addresses, passwords, social graph, usernames through account registration and normal operations.

Recent Developments

The MrExcel dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.

Data Points Exposed

7 verified field types
Activity History
Date of Birth High
Email Address
IP Address
Password High
Social Graph
Username

Breach Impact

The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for MrExcel users and drew scrutiny of its data protection.

Exploitation & Downstream Threats

• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses

Principal Risk Advisory

What this means for a principal

An education-sector breach: student, staff and identity records support identity theft and targeted phishing. For a high-profile principal the main risk is credible impersonation and enrichment of existing exposure.

What You Should Do

  1. Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
  2. Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.

How ObscureIQ Can Help

  1. Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
  2. Exposure mapping: cross-reference the exposed identifiers against broker-available data to size and prioritize the principal's wider footprint.
  3. ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).

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