Fotolog 2018 Data Breach
Platform · Photo sharing and blogging · Social media platform (legacy) · Global
Fotolog Photo-Sharing Social Network Breach (2018): 500K User Accounts Including Passwords Exposed
Photo blogging social network.
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.
500KRecords
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 December 2018, the photo-sharing network Fotolog suffered a data breach exposing 16.7 million unique email addresses along with usernames and passwords stored as unsalted SHA-256 hashes. The data surfaced in 2019 as part of the multi-site 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…
500K records analyzed
About Fotolog
Fotolog was a photo-sharing social network, historically popular in Latin America and Europe, where users posted daily photos and interacted with a large community.
Why They Hold Your Data
Legacy photo-sharing platforms collect user accounts, emails, usernames, photos, comments, and social-engagement history tied to personal publishing and online identity.
Recent Developments
Fotolog largely declined and shut down over the years. The breached data later circulated within a large dark-web collection of compromised sites.
Data Points Exposed
3 verified field types
Email Address
Password High
Username
Breach Impact
Unsalted SHA-256 hashes are vulnerable to cracking at scale, exposing reused email/password pairs to credential-stuffing attacks across other services.
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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