Mashable 2020 Data Breach
Media & News / News
Mashable 2020 Data Breach
A news service in the media & news 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.
1.4MRecords
2020Year
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 approximately mid-2020, Mashable suffered a data breach that subsequently turned up publicly in November 2020. The data included 1.4 million unique email addresses along with names, genders, expired auth tokens, physical locations, links to social media profiles and days and months of birth. The data was provided to HIBP by dehashed.com.
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…
1.4M records analyzed
About Mashable
Mashable is a news service in the media & news sector.
Why They Hold Your Data
Mashable is a news service in the media & news sector. Services like this typically hold auth token, dates of birth, email addresses, names, gender, location data, IP addresses, social profiles through account registration and normal operations.
Recent Developments
The Mashable dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.
Data Points Exposed
8 verified field types
Authentication Token High
Date of Birth High
Email Address
Full Name
Gender
Geographic location
IP Address
Social Media Profile
Breach Impact
The exposure created downstream fraud and phishing risk for those affected and drew scrutiny of Mashable's data protection.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Identity verification bypass using name + date of birth combination | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure | • Social media account targeting and impersonation
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).
Protect Yourself
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