high severity October 03, 2020 · 3 min read

Gravatar — 114 Million Email Addresses Recovered From Avatar URLs (2020)

If you are a customer of Gravatar, here’s what’s now in circulation.

Gravatar identifies you by the MD5 hash of your email address, published in the URL of your avatar on every site that uses it. Scraping the API yielded 167 million profiles; 114 million of those hashes were cracked back to the original addresses. Gravatar disputes that this was a breach.

What happened

In October 2020 a security researcher published a technique for scraping large volumes of data from Gravatar, the service that supplies a single globally recognised avatar across many websites. 167 million names, usernames and MD5 hashes of email addresses were subsequently scraped and distributed. 114 million of those MD5 hashes were cracked and redistributed alongside the source hash, revealing the original email address.

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Gravatar's position, published after the addresses became searchable in HIBP, is that it was not hacked — the data was gathered from a public API doing what it was designed to do. That is accurate, and it is the interesting part.

The design decision at the centre of this

Gravatar works by identifying you with the MD5 hash of your email address. When a site shows your avatar, it builds an image URL containing that hash. The hash is therefore published, by design, on every page where your avatar appears — every WordPress comment, every developer forum, every profile.

MD5 is fast and unsalted, and email addresses are low-entropy: they follow predictable patterns and can be generated in bulk. Hashing a candidate list and matching against a published hash is trivially cheap. Around two thirds of the scraped hashes fell.

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What the free scan actually returns

Sample resultyou@email.comIllustrative — not a real person

Found on people-search siteswe remove these

These listings are live, public, and legal to remove — and removing them is what we do.

value redacted in this sampleage, relatives, address historySpokeo

value redacted in this samplephone, household, property recordsBeenVerified

value redacted in this sample580 companies checked

Found in breach recordsverifiedreported — unverified

Each record is labeled: confirmed breach data, or an attacker’s claim no one has verified.

verifiedvalue redacted in this samplepassword + phone · 2024telecom breach

unverifiedvalue redacted in this sampleclaimed in ransomware listing · 2026leak-site claim

Leaked data cannot be deleted from the internet — anyone claiming otherwise is lying. Broker listings can be removed. We do the second, and show you exactly what to fix from the first.

Report details & sourcing

Severity High contact details only, none of them permanent

Disclosed October 03, 2020

Last reviewed July 22, 2026

Affected 114.0M email addresses

Data exposed Email addressesNamesUsernames

By GalaxyWarden Threat Research · Editorial & sourcing standards

Editorial & sourcing policy

GalaxyWarden is a breach-monitoring service and news aggregator. We do not exfiltrate, host, purchase, or redistribute stolen data. Breach information is compiled from publicly accessible sources and threat-intelligence platforms, and is reported as claims attributed to their source. We promptly correct or remove material shown to be inaccurate — see our content & takedown policy or write to support@galaxywarden.com.

Related breaches

critical June 29, 2020