Bookchor 2021 Data Breach
Retail & Commerce / E-commerce
Bookchor 2021 Data Breach
An indian book trading 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.
498KRecords
2021Year
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 January 2021, the Indian book trading website Bookchor suffered a data breach that exposed half a million customer records. The exposed data included email and IP addresses, names, genders, dates of birth, phone numbers and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes. The data was subsequently traded on a popular hacking forum.
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…
498K records analyzed
About Bookchor
Bookchor is an indian book trading website.
Why They Hold Your Data
Bookchor is an indian book trading website. Services like this typically hold dates of birth, email addresses, names, gender, IP addresses, passwords, phone numbers, social profiles through account registration and normal operations.
Recent Developments
The Bookchor dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.
Data Points Exposed
8 verified field types
Date of Birth High
Email Address
Full Name
Gender
IP Address
Password High
Phone Number
Social Media Profile
Breach Impact
The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for Bookchor 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 | • Social media account targeting and impersonation
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.
- Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
- 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 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.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
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