ixigo 2019 Data Breach
Platform · Travel booking and planning · Online travel marketplace · India
ixigo Indian Travel & Booking Platform Breach (2019): 17 Million Customer Records Including Passport Numbers & Passwords Exposed
Indian travel and booking platform.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
58/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Moderate: notable exposure with meaningful misuse potential.
Data Sensitivity i
ElevatedExposed data raises the risk of fraud, targeting, and impersonation. Proactive steps are warranted.
17.2MRecords
2019Year
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
Gov IDPassport Number
Breach Summary
ixigo, a major India-based travel and hotel booking platform, suffered a data breach on approximately January 1, 2019 when an attacker affiliated with the GnosticPlayers hacker group exfiltrated approximately 7.23 gigabytes of user data from ixigo's systems. The breach was part of a broader GnosticPlayers attack series that compromised approximately 620 million records across sixteen websites globally, with some sources reporting up to 127 million records across eight websites in the specific tranche containing ixigo. The stolen data was offered for sale on the Dream Market dark-web marketplace beginning February 2019. ixigo founder Aloke Bajpai initially denied the breach when first reported on February 13, 2019, but subsequently acknowledged the incident following further verification. The breach affected approximately 17.2 million unique user records based on records indexed by Have I Been Pwned and DataBreach.com, with some sources reporting up to 18 million records. Compromised fields included email addresses, full names, salutations, gender, phone numbers, social media profile linkages including Facebook URLs, IP addresses, device information, authentication tokens, usernames, and passwords stored as MD5 hashes. For a small subset of users who used ixigo for international travel booking, the dataset also included passport names and passport identification numbers. The MD5 password storage represents a deprecated cryptographic algorithm vulnerable to rapid brute-force cracking, and ixigo subsequently confirmed the use of MD5 and migrated to stronger hashing. For affected users, the practical risk profile is significant due to the combination of credential exposure, authentication token exposure, and the inclusion of passport data for the international-travel subset. The MD5 password exposure means original password values are recoverable for many users, supporting credential-stuffing attacks against email, financial, and other Indian platforms where users may have reused the same password. The authentication token exposure may have permitted session hijacking and account takeover attacks during the period before ixigo reset all user passwords and tokens. For users whose passport information was included, the risk extends to international identity-fraud scenarios because passport numbers can support travel-document fraud, border-control identity exploitation, and synthetic-identity construction for opening financial accounts in jurisdictions that accept passport-based identity verification. Affected users should change any reused passwords immediately, enable two-factor authentication on important accounts, monitor financial accounts for unusual activity, and remain alert to travel-themed phishing referencing real ixigo booking history. Users whose passport information was exposed should consider notifying their passport-issuing authority and remaining alert to identity-document fraud over an extended timeframe given that passport numbers do not expire frequently.
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…
17.2M records analyzed
About ixigo
ixigo is a major India-based travel and hotel booking platform headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, founded in 2006 by co-founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar. The platform operates as an online travel marketplace at ixigo.com and through mobile applications, allowing users to compare and book flights, hotels, trains, cabs, and destinations across more than 120 travel suppliers and online travel agencies. ixigo claimed approximately 100 million users as of October 2018, making it one of India's largest travel-booking platforms. As an account-based travel marketplace, ixigo maintained substantial user account data including identity, contact information, demographic profile data, social media linkages used for sign-in, device information, authentication tokens, and travel-document information including passport details for international booking workflows.
Why They Hold Your Data
Travel-planning platforms collect user accounts, contact details, itineraries, search history, booking-linked data, and location or trip-planning behavior across travel services.
Recent Developments
ixigo continues to operate as a major Indian travel platform. Following the January 2019 breach, ixigo founder Aloke Bajpai initially denied the breach claims on February 13, 2019, stating that the company was investigating and had not confirmed the incident. Following further verification by the security research community, ixigo subsequently acknowledged the breach and announced a substantial security response including resetting all user passwords, implementing two-factor authentication, encrypting all personally identifiable information in their databases, conducting regular external API and infrastructure audits by a third-party security firm, implementing perimeter controls, and isolating corporate infrastructure from production infrastructure. The breach was redistributed and indexed by DataBreach.com on March 17, 2025. ixigo has continued to expand its user base and platform capabilities since the 2019 incident without public disclosure of subsequent breaches.
Data Points Exposed
11 verified field types
Authentication Token High
Device Information
Email Address
Full Name
Gender
Passport Number Critical
Password High
Phone Number
Salutation
Social Media Profile
Username
Breach Impact
The institutional impact on ixigo has been moderate given the platform's prompt and substantive security response after initial denial. ixigo incurred costs associated with the comprehensive security overhaul, password reset across the entire user base, third-party security auditing, and reputational management within the Indian travel-platform sector. Civil litigation has been limited based on publicly available information. The reputational impact concentrated within the Indian online travel agency sector where ixigo competes with MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Cleartrip, and others. The case has been cited in Indian and international cybersecurity coverage as illustrating both the broad GnosticPlayers attack pattern and a relatively positive example of post-breach security response despite the initial denial. The 2019 breach predates India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, meaning the regulatory framework that would apply to a similar breach today is materially more stringent than the framework that applied at the time.
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 | • Social media account targeting and impersonation
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A travel or hospitality breach: itinerary, loyalty and contact data supports pattern-of-life inference and travel-themed phishing. 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
- Freeze credit at all three bureaus and monitor for new-account and tax-refund fraud.
- 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).
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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