Covve 2020 Data Breach
Contact Management Platform · Personal and professional contact management application · Contact management and networking app · Global
Covve Contact Management App Exposure (2020): 22 Million Professional Contact Records Including Job Title Left in Open Database
Contact management and networking app.
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.
22.8MRecords
2020Year
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.
Crucial data exposed
AddressPhysical address
Breach Summary
In February 2020, a large trove tracked as "db8151dd" was found exposed on a publicly facing Elasticsearch server and later confirmed by the contact-management app Covve as coming from a legacy, decommissioned system. It contained roughly 103 million records covering about 22 million individuals, including names, job titles, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Many affected people were third-party contacts stored/enriched by Covve users rather than Covve customers. The data was provided to Have I Been Pwned.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
11 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
22.8M records analyzed
About Covve
Covve is a contact-management / smart-address-book app (developed in Cyprus) that helps users organize professional contacts and enriches contact records with data gathered from the internet.
Why They Hold Your Data
Contact-management apps collect personal and professional contact records, emails, phone numbers, notes, network relationships, and account data tied to address-book organization and networking workflows.
Recent Developments
In February 2020, an exposed publicly facing Elasticsearch database (initially tracked as "db8151dd") was found and later confirmed by Covve as originating from a legacy, decommissioned system. It contained ~103 million records covering about 22 million people.
Data Points Exposed
6 verified field types
Email Address
Full Name
Job Information
Phone Number
Physical address High
Social Media Profile
Breach Impact
Because Covve enriched and stored contact records for people who were merely in users' address books (not Covve users themselves), the exposure affected millions of third parties with no direct relationship to the app. Exposed names, job titles, emails, phones, and addresses enable targeted phishing, business-themed social engineering, and doxxing.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Targeted phishing and business-themed social engineering using name/job/employer | • SIM-swap targeting using phone numbers | • Doxxing and physical targeting from exposed addresses | • Identity enrichment across contact graphs
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 this is targeting-grade, not merely identity-theft-grade: the combination lets an adversary locate, impersonate, or pressure the principal with little additional work.
What You Should Do
- Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
- 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).
RD
Threat Actor: Researcher disclosure
Attribution based on available breach intelligence.
Read the full threat-actor profile →Protect Yourself
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