Elance 2009 Data Breach

Elance 2009 Data Breach

Employment / Job Search

Elance 2009 Data Breach

A staffing platform.

Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
30/100
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.
1.1MRecords
2009Year

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
EmploymentJob SearchUsers2009

Breach Summary

In January 2009, the staffing platform Elance suffered a major data breach that impacted roughly 1.3 million accounts. The compromised dataset contained a range of personal details, including email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, employers, and geographic locations, along with passwords stored as SHA1 hashes.

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…

1.1M records analyzed

About Elance

Elance is a staffing platform.

Why They Hold Your Data

Elance is a staffing platform. Services like this typically hold email addresses, employer, location data, passwords, phone numbers, usernames through account registration and normal operations.

Recent Developments

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

Data Points Exposed

6 verified field types
Email Address
Employer
Geographic location
Password High
Phone Number
Username

Breach Impact

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

Exploitation & Downstream Threats

• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure | • Employment-based social engineering using job and employer data

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).

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