Protemps 2021 Data Breach

Protemps 2021 Data Breach

Employment / Job Search

Protemps 2021 Data Breach

A singaporean recruitment website.

Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Limited DisclosureThis breach is handled differently. Because being connected to it can itself be sensitive, we do not confirm anyone’s presence publicly.
Breach Risk Index i
44/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Moderate: notable exposure with meaningful misuse potential.
Data Sensitivity i
Restricted
Being associated with this breach can itself be harmful. Disclosure is limited and presence is not confirmed to unverified parties.
50KRecords
2021Year

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
AddressPhysical address
Classification Tags
Cloud MisconfigurationEmploymentJob SearchUsers2021

Breach Summary

In October 2021, the Singaporean recruitment website Protemps suffered a data breach that exposed almost 50,000 unique email addresses. The impacted data includes names, email and physical addresses, phone numbers, passport numbers and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes, among troves of other jobseeker data.

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…

50K records analyzed

About Protemps

Protemps is a singaporean recruitment website.

Why They Hold Your Data

Protemps is a singaporean recruitment website. Services like this typically hold email addresses, names, gender, job application data, nationality, passport numbers, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses, relationship status, religion, salutation through account registration and normal operations.

Recent Developments

The Protemps dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.

Data Points Exposed

12 verified field types
Email Address
Full Name
Gender
Job Application Data
Nationality Or Citizenship
Passport Number Critical
Password High
Phone Number
Physical address High
Relationship Status
Religion
Salutation

Breach Impact

The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for Protemps 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 consumer-service breach: contact and account data supports phishing, account takeover and profile enrichment. 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

  1. Freeze credit at all three bureaus and monitor for new-account and tax-refund fraud.
  2. Treat the home address as exposed: review mail and package handling and physical-security routines, and brief household staff to verify unusual requests.
  3. Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
  4. Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
  5. Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.

How ObscureIQ Can Help

  1. Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
  2. 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.
  3. ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).

Protect Yourself

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