Kickstarter 2014 Data Breach
Financial Services / Crowdfunding
Kickstarter 2014 Data Breach
A crowdfunding service in the financial services sector.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
38/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Moderate: notable exposure with meaningful misuse potential.
Data Sensitivity i
StandardExposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
5.2MRecords
2014Year
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
March 24th 2025, 8:00 pm EDT, In February 2014, Kickstarter, the renowned crowdfunding platform, fell victim to a significant data breach that compromised the personal information of approximately 5.2 million users. The breach was discovered when law enforcement officials alerted Kickstarter to unauthorized access of their systems. The exposed data encompassed usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords.
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…
5.2M records analyzed
About Kickstarter
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding service in the financial services sector.
Why They Hold Your Data
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding service in the financial services sector. Services like this typically hold email addresses, passwords through account registration and normal operations.
Recent Developments
The Kickstarter dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.
Data Points Exposed
2 verified field types
Email Address
Password High
Breach Impact
The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for Kickstarter users and drew scrutiny of its data protection.
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 financial-institution breach: account, wealth or payment data supports direct fraud and highly credible financial-impersonation scams. 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).
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