KnownCircle 2016 Data Breach
Social Networking / Community
KnownCircle 2016 Data Breach
A community service in the social networking sector.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
17/100
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.
2.0MRecords
2016Year
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
AddressPhysical address
Breach Summary
In approximately April 2016, the "marketing automation for agents and professional service providers" company KnownCircle had a large volume of data obtained by an external party. The data belonging to the now defunct service appeared in JSON format and contained gigabytes of data related to the real estate and insurance sectors. The personal data in the breach appears to have primarily been used for marketing purposes, including logs of emails sent and tracking of gift cards.
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…
2.0M records analyzed
About KnownCircle
KnownCircle is a community service in the social networking sector.
Why They Hold Your Data
KnownCircle is a community service in the social networking sector. Services like this typically hold email addresses, names, gender, messages, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses through account registration and normal operations.
Recent Developments
The KnownCircle dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.
Data Points Exposed
7 verified field types
Email Address
Full Name
Gender
Messages And Chat
Password High
Phone Number
Physical address High
Breach Impact
The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for KnownCircle 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
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A social-platform breach: profile and contact-graph data supports impersonation, enrichment and social engineering. 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
- Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
- 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).
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