EyeEm 2018 Data Breach
Platform · Photography sharing and licensing · Creative content marketplace · Global
EyeEm Photography Community & Marketplace Breach (2018): 19 Million User Accounts Including Passwords & Profile Bios Exposed
Photography community and marketplace.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
23/100
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.
19.9MRecords
2018Year
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 February 2018, the photography platform EyeEm suffered a data breach exposing roughly 19.9 million records (about 19.86 million unique email addresses). Exposed data included email addresses, first names, usernames, profile bios, and passwords stored as SHA-1 hashes with salts. The data surfaced in 2019 within the large collection sold by the actor known as GnosticPlayers.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
12 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
19.9M records analyzed
About EyeEm
EyeEm is a photography community and stock-image marketplace where photographers upload, license, and sell their images to a global audience.
Why They Hold Your Data
Creative content marketplaces collect creator identity, portfolio data, licensing activity, account records, and engagement history tied to photography sharing and commercial licensing.
Recent Developments
EyeEm notified users and required password resets after the incident. The stolen data later circulated as part of a large multi-site collection sold on dark-web marketplaces.
Data Points Exposed
5 verified field types
Email Address
Full Name
Password High
Profile Bio
Username
Breach Impact
SHA-1 hashing offers weak protection, so many passwords were recoverable, exposing reused credentials; inclusion in a widely traded multi-site collection amplified cross-service risk.
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).
G
Threat Actor: GnosticPlayersConfidence: Medium
Motivation: Financial
A prolific breach seller persona active around 2019 and associated with large batches of stolen account databases. Some modern reporting groups GnosticPlayers with the broader ShinyHunters data-theft ecosystem, but that relationship should be handled cautiously.
This breach is linked to the GnosticPlayers batches (2019) campaign (2019 related breaches tracked by ObscureIQ). See the full campaign analysis →
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