XKCD 2019 Data Breach

XKCD 2019 Data Breach

Social Networking / Community

XKCD 2019 Data Breach

A forum for webcomic.

Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
14/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Lower: limited current risk based on data value and recency.
Data Sensitivity i
Standard
Exposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
562KRecords
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.

Classification Tags
Social NetworkingCommunityUsers2019

Breach Summary

In July 2019, the forum for webcomic XKCD suffered a data breach that impacted 562k subscribers. The breached phpBB forum leaked usernames, email and IP addresses and passwords stored in MD5 phpBB3 format. The data was provided to HIBP by white hat security researcher and data analyst Adam Davies.

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…

562K records analyzed

About XKCD

XKCD is a forum for webcomic.

Why They Hold Your Data

XKCD is a forum for webcomic. Services like this typically hold email addresses, IP addresses, passwords, usernames through account registration and normal operations.

Recent Developments

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

Data Points Exposed

4 verified field types
Email Address
IP Address
Password High
Username

Breach Impact

The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for XKCD 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 social-platform breach: profile and contact-graph data supports impersonation, enrichment and social engineering. For a high-profile principal the main risk is credible impersonation and enrichment of existing exposure.

What You Should Do

  1. Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
  2. 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: cross-reference the exposed identifiers against broker-available data to size and prioritize the principal's wider footprint.
  3. ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).

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