ShareThis 2018 Data Breach
Company · Data sharing and audience analytics · Marketing technology platform · Global
ShareThis Audience Data Platform Breach: 41M User Records Including Passwords & Date of Birth
Data and content sharing tools provider.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
24/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Lower: limited current risk based on data value and recency.
Data Sensitivity i
StandardExposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
41.0MRecords
2018Year
The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.
Breach Summary
ShareThis, a data and marketing technology company whose sharing buttons appear on millions of websites, suffered a breach in July 2018 that exposed records on approximately 41 million individuals. The company operates not just as a social sharing tool but as an audience data platform, collecting and selling behavioral data gathered through its widespread web presence. The breach pathway involved a misconfiguration, and the exposed data surfaced for sale on dark web marketplaces in 2019 before circulating more broadly. The exposed records included email addresses, names, dates of birth, and in some cases password hashes. Because ShareThis functions as a data broker rather than a consumer-facing service, most affected individuals had no direct relationship with the company and likely had no knowledge their information was held there. This makes the breach particularly concerning: people cannot protect data they do not know has been collected about them. The combination of behavioral tracking data with personal identifiers creates real risk of cross-site profiling, phishing, and targeted manipulation. No prominent regulatory action or settlement specific to this breach has been documented. ShareThis notified relevant parties and brought in cybersecurity investigators following the incident. For affected individuals, the practical risks include credential stuffing attacks if password hashes are cracked, as well as phishing campaigns built on the detailed profiles this data can enable. Anyone who may have used a site featuring ShareThis widgets should consider changing passwords used around that period, particularly if the same credentials were reused elsewhere.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
41.0M records analyzed
About ShareThis
ShareThis is a data and marketing technology company providing social sharing widgets, audience analytics, and consumer data services to publishers and advertisers. The company's sharing buttons appear on millions of websites globally, enabling users to share content to social networks while simultaneously collecting browsing and behavioral data. ShareThis generates revenue by selling audience data and analytics products derived from this web-scale tracking activity.
Why They Hold Your Data
Adtech and tracking platforms collect cross-site behavioral data, device identifiers, browsing activity, and engagement signals to enable targeted advertising and analytics across the web.
Recent Developments
ShareThis continues to operate as a marketing data company. The company has navigated increasing scrutiny of third-party tracking and cookie-based data collection as browsers and regulators have moved to restrict such practices. No major organizational changes beyond this industry context have been prominently reported.
Data Points Exposed
4 verified field types
Date of Birth High
Email Address
Full Name
Password High
Breach Impact
In July 2018 ShareThis suffered a breach exposing approximately 41 million unique email addresses along with names, dates of birth, and in some cases password hashes. The data was placed for sale on dark web marketplaces in 2019. ShareThis notified relevant parties and engaged cybersecurity investigators. Because the company operates as a data broker rather than a direct consumer service, many of the affected individuals had no direct relationship with ShareThis and no awareness their data was held there. No settlement or regulatory action specific to this breach has been prominently documented.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • Identity verification bypass using name + date of birth combination | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A data-broker/identity breach: aggregated identity attributes re-seed broker networks and enrich targeting of the individual. For a high-profile principal the main risk is credible impersonation and enrichment of existing exposure.
What You Should Do
- Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
- Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.
How ObscureIQ Can Help
- Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
- Exposure mapping: cross-reference the exposed identifiers against broker-available data to size and prioritize the principal's wider footprint.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
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