Benchmark 2019 Data Breach
Media & News / News
Benchmark 2019 Data Breach
A serbian technology news website.
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
StandardExposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
93KRecords
2019Year
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 November 2019, the Serbian technology news website Benchmark suffered a breach of its forum that exposed 93k customer records. The breach exposed IP and email addresses, usernames and passwords stored as salted MD5 hashes. A forum administrator subsequently advised that the breach was due to the forum previously running on an outdated vBulletin instance.
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…
93K records analyzed
About Benchmark
Benchmark is a serbian technology news website.
Why They Hold Your Data
Benchmark is a serbian technology news website. Services like this typically hold email addresses, IP addresses, passwords, usernames through account registration and normal operations.
Recent Developments
The Benchmark dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.
Data Points Exposed
4 verified field types
Email Address
IP Address
Password High
Username
Breach Impact
The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for Benchmark users and drew scrutiny of its data protection.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • 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
- 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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