Harvard breach compromised records from 851,000 unique accounts
The ShinyHunters extortion gang earlier claimed responsibility for the cyberattack.
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- Have I Been Pwned says the Harvard breach exposed 850,500 unique accounts.
- Attackers accessed Harvard Alumni Affairs and Development systems through phone-based phishing, the university said.
- The leaked data includes names, emails, birth dates, phone numbers, addresses, donation details, and event attendance.
- Harvard said the affected systems did not store Social Security numbers, passwords, payment card data, or financial data.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
Cybercriminals who breached Harvard University’s systems a year ago stole data related to more than 850,000 unique email addresses, breach notification service Have I Been Pwned has said.
Harvard University discovered the data breach on November 18th, 2025, and said that the data contained records from the Affairs and Development department.
“Information systems used by Alumni Affairs and Development were accessed by an unauthorized party as a result of a phone-based phishing attack,” the university soon confirmed.
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The university didn’t attribute the attack to a specific hacking group or threat actor but phone-based phishing, also known as vishing, is an attack vector most often used by ShinyHunters, the infamous extortion group.
In February 2026, ShinyHunters released datasets containing over 1 million records from Harvard University after it refused to pay a ransom to have the data returned or destroyed.
Now, Have I Been Pwned, a data breach search and notification service, analyzed the data leaked by the gang and confirmed that the breach exposed the data of 850,500 “unique” accounts.
“The data contained 851k unique email addresses relating to the university's alumni and fundraising systems, along with extensive profile information for donors, alumni, parents and some faculty, staff and students,” Have I Been Pwned said in an update.
The cache includes names, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, physical addresses, social media profiles, details of donations to Harvard, and even event attendance.
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Last year, Harvard said the breached systems didn’t store the most sensitive data: Social Security numbers, passwords, payment card information, or financial data.
Still, cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock pointed out in their technical report of the hack: “This incident is not merely a leak of names; it is a collapse of institutional data sovereignty. It exposes the private lives, financial liquidity, and intimate institutional strategies governing the world’s most influential academic donor base.”
