EmailLeaked Methodology

What this means for you

EmailLeaked is a public breach-awareness tool. It can help you see whether an email address or password appears in known breach data, but it cannot prove that an account has never been exposed anywhere.

Use the results as a practical starting point. If a company, bank, employer, school, or government agency sends you an official breach notice, follow that notice even if EmailLeaked does not show a matching result.

Data sources and limits

EmailLeaked checks breach and password data through third-party services. Those services may include confirmed breach records, public incident metadata, and password hash datasets.

EmailLeaked does not host illegal credential dumps, sell raw stolen records, or give users access to leaked databases.

• A clean result means we did not find a match in the datasets currently checked.
• A missing result may also mean a breach is private, newly disclosed, not indexed, or outside the provider's current scope.
• Coverage can change as providers verify, license, update, or remove data.

Email breach checks

When you enter an email address, EmailLeaked sends the lookup to breach data providers in real time and returns matching breach records where available.

The email entered into the checker is not written to an EmailLeaked user lookup database. The result is meant to help you decide which accounts to review first.

Password leak checks

Password checks use k-anonymity. Your browser hashes the password locally and sends only the first five characters of the SHA-1 hash prefix to the password breach API.

EmailLeaked does not receive, store, or transmit the plaintext password. The result tells you whether that password hash appears in known breached password datasets.

How breach pages are built

Breach pages are designed to answer three plain questions: what happened, what data may have been exposed, and what a person should do next.

1. Identify: We map the breach to its known name, affected service, reported date, exposure count, and exposed data classes where available.
2. Explain: We describe what the exposed fields mean for a person, such as phishing risk, credential stuffing risk, or identity fraud risk.
3. Respond: We prioritize practical steps such as password changes, unique passwords, two-factor authentication, account review, and monitoring.

Privacy controls in the checker

The checker is designed to work without creating an account, subscribing to a paid plan, or storing a public lookup history.

• No account required: Users can run a check without signing up.
• Password privacy: Password checks use local hashing and partial hash lookup.
• Limited retention: Emails entered into the public checker are processed in real time and are not stored as a user lookup database.

Risk labels

Risk labels are based mainly on the type of data exposed. They help readers prioritize action; they are not company rankings or legal judgments.

• High risk: Passwords, financial data, government IDs, health data, or combinations that can enable fraud.
• Medium risk: Emails, usernames, phone numbers, locations, IP addresses, or account metadata that can increase phishing risk.
• Low risk: Limited profile data or lower-sensitivity fields with no known password or financial exposure.

How recommendations are chosen

Recommendations are based on the exposed data type and the most common downstream risks. Password exposure usually means changing reused passwords and using a password manager. Email-only exposure usually means watching for phishing, reviewing account settings, and strengthening recovery options.

Advice is intentionally conservative. We do not tell every reader to take the most extreme action for every exposure, but we do flag cases where exposed data can be reused for credential stuffing, identity fraud, targeted phishing, or account recovery attacks.

Sources, review, and corrections

Security guides and breach articles are reviewed for practical accuracy, reader safety, and source quality before publication. We prefer primary sources such as company notices, regulator notices, court documents, security advisories, and official help pages when they are available.

When a source changes, a breach is disputed, or a reader reports an error, we review the page and update the content where needed. Correction requests can be sent through the contact form.

For more detail about our publishing standards, see the editorial policy.