Master Deeds

What Happened

In March 2017, a 27GB database backup file named "Master Deeds" was sent to HIBP by a supporter of the project. Upon detailed analysis later that year, the file was found to contain the personal data of tens of millions of living and deceased South African residents. The data included extensive personal attributes such as names, addresses, ethnicities, genders, birth dates, government issued personal identification numbers and 2.2 million email addresses. At the time of publishing, it's alleged the data was sourced from Dracore Data Sciences (Dracore is yet to publicly confirm or deny the data was sourced from their systems). On 18 October 2017, the file was found to have been published to a publicly accessible web server where it was located at the root of an IP address with directory listing enabled. The file was dated 8 April 2015.

Compromised Data

Dates of birth
Deceased statuses
Email addresses
Employers
Ethnicities
Genders
Government issued IDs
Home ownership statuses
Job titles
Names
Nationalities
Phone numbers
Physical addresses

Recommended Actions

Monitor for Suspicious Activity

Watch for unusual login attempts, spam and phishing emails.

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Breach Overview

  • Affected Accounts:

    2.3 million

  • Breach Occurred:

    March 2017

  • Added to HIBP:

    18 Oct 2017

Recommended Actions

Change Your Password

If you haven't changed your Master Deeds password since 2017, do so immediately.

Enable Two-Factor Authentication

Add an extra layer of security to your account.

Check Other Accounts

If you used the same password elsewhere, change those too.

Monitor for Suspicious Activity

Watch for unusual login attempts or messages from your account.

1Password

Use 1Password to generate and store strong, unique passwords for all your accounts.

Try 1Password