Animeify Data Breach Exposed Over 800,000 Users’ Plain Text Passwords
Published
- Breach details: In October 2021, the now-defunct Arabic anime website Animeify suffered a significant data breach.
- Scale of breach: The incident reportedly compromised the data of 808,000 unique users.
- Critical exposure: Unencrypted, plain-text passwords were leaked, posing a severe security risk.
A significant data breach from October 2021 involving the Arabic-language anime streaming website Animeify was added to breach notification service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) on September 21, 2025. The incident compromised the personal information of users, exposing them to substantial security risks.
Details of the Animeify Data Breach
The data breach has resurfaced after the compromised data was redistributed as part of a larger data corpus. It exposed a significant amount of personally identifiable information (PII). The compromised dataset included:
- 808,000 unique email addresses
- genders
- names
- usernames
- passwords stored in plain text
This lack of basic encryption means that anyone who obtained the data had direct access to user accounts without needing to perform any decryption or cracking.
The exposure of plain-text passwords is a severe security risk. It compromises user password integrity and significantly increases the risk of credential stuffing attacks, where threat actors use exposed credential combinations to attempt unauthorized access to other online services where victims may have reused the same credentials.
Cybersecurity Implications
While the Animeify website is now defunct, the cybersecurity implications of this breach persist, as the leak provides a valuable resource for malicious actors. This data is likely to be integrated into broader databases used for large-scale phishing campaigns, credential stuffing attacks, and identity theft.
This incident serves as a critical case study on the necessity of implementing fundamental security measures, such as password hashing and salting. Storing passwords in an unencrypted format is a direct violation of security best practices and places users at extreme and unnecessary risk.Â
Users who had accounts on the Animeify platform are strongly advised to change their passwords on any other service where they may have reused the same credentials.
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