500px 2018 Data Breach
Arts & Creative / Photography Community & Marketplace / Consumer
500px 2018 Data Breach: 14.8 Million Photography-Community Accounts Exposed
Online photography community and image-licensing marketplace.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
23/100
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.
14.9MRecords
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
In July 2018, 500px was breached, exposing data on about 14.8 million users; the company discovered it only in February 2019, after which GnosticPlayers offered the data for sale. Exposed data included email addresses, names, usernames, gender, dates of birth and passwords hashed with MD5 or bcrypt.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
12 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
14.9M records analyzed
About 500px
500px is an online photography community and image-licensing marketplace where photographers showcase, share and license their work to a global audience.
Why They Hold Your Data
A photography community holds member identity and contact data, usernames, dates of birth, gender and hashed account passwords.
Recent Developments
500px continues to operate (later under Visual China Group ownership). It disclosed the breach in February 2019 after discovering the July 2018 intrusion.
Data Points Exposed
7 verified field types
Date of Birth High
Email Address
Full Name
Gender
Geographic location
Password High
Username
Breach Impact
500px forced a site-wide password reset and notified users; the breach was part of the large GnosticPlayers 2019 dark-web sales wave.
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 | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A consumer-service breach: contact and account data supports phishing, account takeover and profile enrichment. 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).
G
Threat Actor: GnosticPlayersConfidence: Medium
Motivation: Financial
A prolific breach seller persona active around 2019 and associated with large batches of stolen account databases. Some modern reporting groups GnosticPlayers with the broader ShinyHunters data-theft ecosystem, but that relationship should be handled cautiously.
This breach is linked to the GnosticPlayers batches (2019) campaign (2019 related breaches tracked by ObscureIQ). See the full campaign analysis →
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