Chegg Data Breach

What happened

In April 2018, the textbook rental service Chegg suffered a data breach that impacted 40 million subscribers. The exposed data included email addresses, usernames, names and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes. A small number of records also contained physical address or phone number.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Change your Chegg password immediately, and update it anywhere you reused the same password.
• Enable two-factor authentication on the affected account and on your critical services (email, banking).
• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing Chegg — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Stay alert for smishing (SMS phishing) and SIM-swap attempts using your phone number.
• Exposed identity data raises identity-theft risk — consider credit monitoring or a credit freeze.