START Data Breach

What happened

In August 2022, news broke of an attack against the Russian streaming service "START". The incident led to the exposure of 44M records containing 7.4M unique email addresses. The impacted data also included the subscriber's country and password hash. START subsequently acknowledged the incident in a Telegram post and stated that the data dated back to 2021.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Change your START 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 START — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Check whether your email address appears in this breach on haveibeenpwned.com.