SoundCloud Data Breach Now on HaveIBeenPwned
(haveibeenpwned.com)208 points by gnabgib 5 days ago
208 points by gnabgib 5 days ago
They still seem to use past email addresses for marketing communications, despite the email address on file having been changed months ago. They definitely still keep old data around and fail to sync data between vendors. Whether that's indicative of their data deletion policies remains to be seen, but to me the lack of care for using past data for active accounts doesn't paint them in a very good light.
I ran into this with Sony. The website said to call, so I did. After 45 minutes on hold the guy just hung up on me saying he couldn’t help, without even really listening to me.
For a company that’s been hacked as many times as Sony, I find this to be pretty pathetic.
In theory, it's a legal requirement based on GDPR and CCPA as well as many other new digital rights laws across Europe and many states in the USA. SoundCloud is probably big enough to do that correctly otherwise e.g. the GDPR penalty is a highish percentage of the company's total revenue which gives the laws a good amount of "teeth".
> the GDPR penalty is a highish percentage of the company's total revenue which gives the laws a good amount of "teeth"
Under 2% of GDPR complaints even result in fines. And that would require there to be grounds for a complaint - there's no way for an external user to tell whether the delete is actually done, and the DPA won't force them to submit to a third-party source code audit.
The GDPR has zero teeth. But don't take it from me, these guys have a bit more expertise than I do on this subject: https://noyb.eu/en/data-protection-day-5-misconceptions-abou...
People should be using email alias. 1 unique alias per 1 uniques service and websites for proper segregation. If any of the unique alias leaked or getting spammed you'd know where the source is and blocking that specific alias would limit the breach. Theres simplelogin.io, addy.io, firefox relay, apple hide-my-email, custom domain catchall etc for that.
IMO use email providers that have that built in. Because if your alias provider goes down, you’re fucked. And considering it’s a much less stable business than an email provider, it’s more likely.
If Gmail goes down in 20 years, it will be a major occurrence. If mailgoforward.fart goes down, you’re screwed.
The advice is, as always, use a second mail address for “sensitive” providers. Use a password manager and two factor for everything. Ideally one that integrates into your phone and browser.
For traceability, most providers support a + alias syntax now. Ie foobar+baxservice@provider.com
I don't get why + addresses always come up in this. They're machine-undoable by design.
Using randomized relay addresses instead gives you an immensely higher confidence that when a given contact address starts getting spam, it is misuse stemming from a specific entity. Especially if you rotate it at a fixed time interval, cause then you can even establish a starting timeframe.
Still not perfect but it can never really be, and not even out of email's fault. As long as DNS and IP addressing rule the world, there's only so much one can do. Once identity is private-default, it becomes a secret handling problem at its core, a capability these schemes were never designed to provide.
I'd say for longevity and portability use own custom domain. Simplelogin, addy support using own custom domain. Its just $10-15 something per year. Most tld allowed max cumulative renewal up to 10 years so $100-150. Setup a yearly calendar reminder on January to renew +1 year so at any give time the domain will have minimum 9-10 years before expiring. If got hit by a bus tomorrow then 9 years should be long enough time for whatever accounts linked to the domain to rot and be useless for the next domain owner.
> If Gmail goes down in 20 years, it will be a major occurrence. If mailgoforward.fart goes down, you’re screwed.
The technical equivalent of “if you default on a $100,000 loan you have a problem. If you default on a billion dollar loan the _bank_ has a problem.
I have my own domain, so I canary trap the email addresses I give out.
"The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles".
So they've scraped public data. Why care?
> email addresses
Aren't on public SoundCloud profiles.
Hackers stole information of 29.8M accounts (~20% of users). SoundCloud is downplaying the data beyond email address as "publicly available", but the data wasn't scraped. "Profile statistics" aren't public either. Their main response[0], seems to focus on passwords and payment details being the only risky data. They even imply email addresses are public.
> no sensitive data was taken in the incident.The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles (not financial or password data)
[0]: https://soundcloud.com/playbook-articles/protecting-our-user...
If the email addresses were visible on public profile pages in what sense are they not public?
Email addresses are not visible on public soundcloud profiles. You can test this yourself.
I read the statement to be "emails plus public information"
Maybe the two public data points weren't connected before?
I don't use SoundCloud, but if profiles didn't have contact information like Email Address on them then it could be meaningful to now connect those two dots.
Like, 'Hey look, Person A, who is known to use email address X, kept Lost Prophets as one of their liked artists even after 2013!'
Yeah or this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26386418
SoundCloud is a weird place, people in entertainment have certain strong incentives. They figured out who I am, figured out all the email addresses I have, jacked the account attached to my SoundCloud, stole my account. I still to this day, don't know how they pwned my email (tfa was on but it didn't trigger suspicious activity it let them login without triggering it, no clue how they got the password either and the password is secure enough that it's too hard to brute force, and it's not in a pwned db). Based on what was in my soundcloud inbox when I got access again, someone paid a fair amount to have this done... and now I have to go change my email again I suppose.
Organized crime stealing usernames was apparently a thing for a few years back there, interesting it wasn't limited to Twitter.
You are 100% correct based on article. Not good that you're gray, and your parent of "who cares it was already available and scraped" is the top comment.
But, why care? (Yes, we can “care” that there was a leak - but… why worry? what new risk exists today that didn’t yesterday?)
The data in the leak (other than follower count, etc) was already available for purchase from Zoominfo, 8sense, or a variety of other data brokers or other legal marketplaces for PII.
I suppose the risk now is that the data is freely available and no longer behind a data broker’s paywall?
I'm confused, where were scrapers/data brokers/Zoominfo etc. were getting email addresses for SoundCloud accounts?
Importantly, 20% of the total userbase it seems:
> In December 2025, SoundCloud announced it had discovered unauthorised activity on its platform. The incident allowed an attacker to map publicly available SoundCloud profile data to email addresses for approximately 20% of its users. The impacted data included 30M unique email addresses, names, usernames, avatars, follower and following counts and, in some cases, the user’s country.
That's from the haveibeenpwned email which I received because of course I'm part of that 20%.
Remember to have unique passwords for each website kids, ideally with a password manager.
Also, never give out a direct email address, always an alias.
If I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like, aside from the email addresses, all the data leaked was already publicly available on users’ SoundCloud profiles. The only novel aspect is linking that public data to the accounts’ email addresses.
Kinda sad to see a "Recommended Actions", with only sponsors, with ad copy that would be understood by HN readers but not our non-technical friends. (i.e. a simple "Nothing. No passwords have been leaked yet, only metadata" in this case)
An email–only breach seems to cheapen the value of HIBP. It's not telling me if my password was leaked.
It's just advertising slop like any other now. No different from "your computer has a virus, buy our cleaner app"
SoundCloud is the worst company, so hostile to former paying users! I am a hobbyist songwriter and have posted my rough mixes (Apple's Music Memo app which adds drum and bass automagically with two clicks & then mix it in Garage Band) on my SoundCloud for more then ten years. I signed up for their Artist Pro account and was a member for of such consistently for a few years at $17 a month. Once you cancel they then hold all your music hostage by hiding it and later threat to delete it. Horrid!
A former paying user is not a customer. If you don't pay, why should you receive service? I buy a pizza at this pizza shop every week, but I still don't get free ones.
SoundCloud is European, so most of the dark patterns used by American companies to offer "free" service are not available to them, and they are required by law to actually delete data instead of pretending to delete it.
> I buy a pizza at this pizza shop every week, but I still don't get free ones.
Do they take the leftovers from your fridge when you stop buying?
The analogy was bad. You're effectively renting space in their fridge. In that case, absolutely.
If I haven't bought pizza for two months, they use their magical ray, reach into my fridge and turn the leftovers into mold.
The difference between Artist vs Pro is three hours vs unlimited uploaded music.
So if you had over three hours uploaded, it seems reasonable for them to restrict the service. If you had <= three, then it would a problem.
SoundCloud used to be good prior to the redesign.
Recently I decided to evaluate it for serious use and start posting there again, only until their new uploader told me I need to switch to a paid plan, even though I triple-checked I was well within free limits and under my old now unused username I uploaded a lot more (mostly of experimental things I am not that proud of anymore).
It looks like their microservices architecture is in chaos and some system overrides the limits outlined in the docs with stricter ones. How can I be sure they respect the new limits once I do pay, instead of upselling me the next plan in line?
Adding to that things like the general jankiness or the never-ending spam from “get more fake listeners for $$$” accounts (which seem to be in an obvious symbiosis with the platform, boosting the numbers for optics), the last year’s ambiguous change in ToS allowing them to train ML systems on your work, it was enough for me to drop it. Thankfully, it was a trial run and I did not publish any pending releases.
If you still publish on SoundCloud, and you do original music (as opposed to publishing, say, DJ sets, where dealing with IP is problematic), ask yourself whether it is timr to grow up and do proper publishing!
This sounds like a classic consistency vs latency trade-off. Enforcing strict quotas across distributed services usually requires coordination that kills performance. They likely rely on asynchronous counters that drift, meaning the frontend check passes but the backend reconciliation fails later. It is surprisingly hard to solve this without making the uploader feel sluggish.
You can export your entire profile using yt-dlp. Of course you have to do it, when you are still a paying customer.
Do this regularly, like youtube soundclownd ‘silent’ deletes favorites and also blocks songs based on your vpn/geo location. I lost so much music… so i need to resort to scraping. Simple solution: make the song unavailable but please just keep the entry (name-title) in your fav. list.
Why would someone that writes their own songs, mixes in GarageBand, uploads to a 3rd party website need to use yt-dlp to get back the files that they themselves made?
Yes, I'm intentionally victim blaming here. The victim is complaining about a 3rd party site deleting files. Who cares? Why would you have as your only source of your files the copies stored by the 3rd party?
You get a point there, but export is mostly about metadata, eg images and description.
Data loss happens too. Soundcloud may be your only source of your own tracks.
Date of publication (copyright) is important to a songwriter. Soundcloud im sure knows this! Probably should have said this from the top!
Not only that, the victim is complaining about a paid file storage company deleting the files when the victim stops paying
that just sounds like customer not paying for service not getting the service
I'm just guessing, but this:
> and have posted my rough mixes [...] on my SoundCloud for more then ten years
...easily implies >3h of uploads, which is over the free plan limit. If you're over that limit and stop paying, yes, it makes perfect sense that they'd threaten with deletion of some of your existing uploads.
They first hide your songs and as time goes on they start threaten to delete your songs if you dont pay
What should they do instead? spend money continuously holding your music on disk forever even though you aren't paying them for the service? Sounds like they are being cool about it by keeping it around for a while and warning you before deleting it.
A lot of people use apps like this lately: https://untitled.stream/, https://gatefolded.com/, https://samply.app/
YouTube is the domain of Satan, also the name is hilarious - you tube? really? I don't tube thaanks
A lot of "rap gods" are about to be exposed as "Kevin" from suburbia.
Lil B is probably fine, but he is the biggest name I recall coming out of SoundCloud. He blew up all over the 2010s, he was the Kanye of Cloudrap too because he took dressing styles and changed it all up similar to Kanye.
I was big on tumblr, but he wasn't my style of rap, but I respect him for what he was able to pull off.
Thankfully the only artist I listen to on there has been known as Bryce from the suberbs for two decades:
This Kevin was still quite impressive
Glad that I removed my SoundCloud account right on time.
I think it’s only a matter of time before a service gets breached.
It's best to use unique random username, email, and password for every online account. Also, providing only the bare minimum of data and faking as much as possible is helpful in cases of data breaches.
Clever spammers (there are some!) see the presence of company@<domain> and assume the user will have similar emails for other accounts, so it might be worth trying ebays scams to ebay@<domain> or banking scams to chase@<domain> or boa@<domain>. Sending is cheap so why not, you're not trying to fool everyone, only a few.
I use a unique string per company but it's not guessable in advance, but it's obvious when looking at it and squinting a bit, for example (and these are not the exact ones I use): sundclod@<domain> or ebuy@<domain> or amzoon@<domain>
Sure I have to remember them but it's easy for me to check and my password manager is filling them in for me 99.99% of the time.
I can filter on those emails instead, and I also know that anything coming to soundcloud@<domain> or ebay@<domain> or amazon@<domain> is definitely spam as I've never used those addresses myself.
If sundclod@<domain> appears in a leak I can (hopefully) change my account email at Soundcloud to sondclud@<domain> and then confine sundclod@<domain> to /dev/null
I have three different generations of email addresses associated with United Airlines that all receive spam. Never any disclosed breaches AFAIK, but clearly email addresses got out at several points. At some point I stopped bothering to check.
As for Soundcloud, the password I had saved for it and a tiny bit of profile information tells me a lot - a manually created password saved into a password manager, probably in 2010 or 2011 and unused after grabbing a single track.
Addresses for services I actually care about also get what's basically peppering, and have all had updates much more recently than the days of Blackberry devices.
Has this happened to you before?
I can't imagine anyone spamming in such low quantities that they'll notice a pattern like company@<domain> and act on it.
I have regularly gotten spam emails without a to, cc, or bcc field though. So I can't tell which email they were sent to. (my host doesn't bounce/drop them for some reason)
I do regularly do misspellings of the company name though, since that often trips the "invalid email" check on signup. e.g. twitter.
For the more shady sites, I use first names or fake usernames.
We are the minority of users that had enough foresight to do this. I'd bet that _most_ people on this breach don't even know about the plus/dot trick with gmail (and I am sure other providers, too).
Oh nice. Maybe I can finally recover (and finally shut down) my old account I accidentally locked myself out of.
How so? I tend to disagree with the general statement that this is common in the infosec world, but I'd like to understand better what you mean by that.
Impact in this case, is non-existent (Wow they got my email)
> I'd like to understand better what you mean by that.
Recall there was a period where every CPU sidechannel attack had a dedicated (wow) website and a rock band name assigned to it (when in reality their impact again, was/is limited).
all this leaked data pretty much used for one objective now: stealing crypto
By aggregating breach data by email, this tool inadvertently exposes users's full web history, including sensitive sites like crypto/adult/dating platforms, to anyone who knows their address
Fun
From the FAQ [1]:
What is a "sensitive breach"?
HIBP enables you to discover if your account was exposed in most of the data breaches by directly searching the system. However, certain breaches are particularly sensitive in that someone's presence in the breach may adversely impact them if others are able to find that they were a member of the site. These breaches are classed as "sensitive" and may not be publicly searched.
A sensitive data breach can only be searched by the verified owner of the email address being searched for. This is done by signing in to the dashboard which involves verifying you can receive an email to the entered address. Once signed in, all breaches (including sensitive ones) are visible in the "Breaches" section under "Personal".
There are presently 82 sensitive breaches in the system including Adult FriendFinder (2015), Adult FriendFinder (2016), Adult-FanFiction.Org, Ashley Madison, Beautiful People, Bestialitysextaboo, Brazzers, BudTrader, Carding Mafia (December 2021), Carding Mafia (March 2021), Catwatchful, CityJerks, Cocospy, Color Dating, CrimeAgency vBulletin Hacks, CTARS, CyberServe, Date Hot Brunettes, DC Health Link, Doxbin and 62 more.
You don't get to gatekeep what counts as "sensitive", all of my privacy is non-negotiable
I went through and deleted a bunch of accounts a while ago, SoundCloud being one of them. It looks like I don't show up in the breach. It's nice to know SoundCloud actually deleted my data, I'm never totally sure what happens on the backend.