HongFire

In March 2015, HongFire, a long-running online forum focused on anime, manga, and related gaming communities, suffered a data breach that exposed a large trove of user account records. The incident is estimated to have occurred on or around March 1, 2015, and involved approximately 1.47 million rows of user data. The forum ran on vBulletin, a widely used message board platform that has been targeted repeatedly by attackers over the years. No individual or group has publicly claimed responsibility for the hack, and the site's operators appear to have issued no detailed public notice about the incident.

Limited public reporting: As of September 25, 2026, detailed company notices or major news coverage for this listing were limited in sources reviewed. The facts below rely primarily on the indexed fields plus any secondary sources cited.

Breach Timeline

March 1, 2015: The breach of the HongFire forum occurred, according to Mozilla Monitor, which dates the incident to this day.

February 5, 2017: The breach was verified and added to public breach monitoring databases, per Mozilla Monitor, roughly two years after the underlying incident.

What Information Was Compromised?

Our analysis found the following data types in this breach: email addresses, usernames, passwords, IP addresses, and dates of birth, as catalogued by Mozilla Monitor. The dataset indexed by LeakCheck contains about 1.47 million records that include email addresses, usernames, and passwords.

There is some disagreement among sources about how the passwords were stored. HEROIC's threat intelligence report describes the exposed passwords as plaintext, meaning they were never hashed or encrypted, while other databases describe them as hashed. If the credentials were stored without hashing, they would have been usable by an attacker immediately.

Not every individual is affected by every type of data listed here.

What Are the Potential Risks for Affected Individuals?

The most direct risk is account takeover. If passwords were exposed in readable form, anyone who reused that password on other sites, such as email, social media, or gaming platforms, could face compromises well beyond HongFire itself. Even hashed passwords can be cracked, especially older or weaker ones.

Email addresses combined with usernames and dates of birth also fuel targeted phishing. An attacker who knows a person's forum handle, birth date, and email address can craft convincing messages that quote real details, making scams harder to spot. Exposure of IP addresses adds a smaller privacy concern, since they can reveal approximate locations at the time of registration or use.

Because the breach happened in 2015, much of this data has circulated for years, which raises the chance it appears in credential stuffing attacks, where automated tools test leaked email and password pairs against other websites.

What Should You Do If You Were Affected?

If you had a HongFire account, take these steps:

Change your HongFire password immediately, and change it anywhere else you reused that password. Password reuse is the single biggest hazard from old forum breaches.

Turn on two-factor authentication wherever it is offered, especially for your email account, which can be used to reset other logins.

Check whether your email address appears in this breach using the search tool.

Be cautious with unsolicited emails that reference anime, gaming, or your forum activity. Attackers often use leaked details to make phishing messages look legitimate.

Consider using a password manager to create unique passwords for every account going forward.