FaceUP 2013 Data Breach

FaceUP 2013 Data Breach

Media & News / Media

FaceUP 2013 Data Breach

A danish social media site.

Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
8/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Lower: limited current risk based on data value and recency.
Data Sensitivity i
Standard
Exposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
88KRecords
2013Year

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.

Classification Tags
Cloud MisconfigurationMedia & NewsMediaUsers2013

Breach Summary

In 2013, the Danish social media site FaceUP suffered a data breach. The incident exposed 87k unique email addresses alongside genders, dates of birth, names, phone numbers and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes. When notified of the incident, FaceUP advised they had identified a SQL injection vulnerability at the time and forced password resets on impacted customers.

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…

88K records analyzed

About FaceUP

FaceUP is a danish social media site.

Why They Hold Your Data

FaceUP is a danish social media site. Services like this typically hold dates of birth, email addresses, names, gender, passwords, phone numbers, usernames through account registration and normal operations.

Recent Developments

The FaceUP dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.

Data Points Exposed

7 verified field types
Date of Birth High
Email Address
Full Name
Gender
Password High
Phone Number
Username

Breach Impact

The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for FaceUP users and drew scrutiny of its data protection.

Exploitation & Downstream Threats

• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • Identity verification bypass using name + date of birth combination | • SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses

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

  1. Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
  2. Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
  3. Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.

How ObscureIQ Can Help

  1. Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
  2. Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
  3. ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).

Protect Yourself

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