Zomato 2017 Data Breach
Platform · Restaurant discovery and food delivery · Marketplace + logistics network · India / Global
Zomato Restaurant Discovery Platform Breach (2017): 16.5 Million User Accounts Including Passwords Exposed
Restaurant discovery and delivery platform.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
12/100
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.
16.5MRecords
2017Year
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 May 2017, Zomato was breached and nearly 17 million accounts were redistributed online. Exposed data included user IDs, names, usernames, email addresses, and passwords stored as salted MD5 hashes. Zomato said the incident stemmed from a compromised employee development account; a hacker using the name "Nclay" claimed responsibility.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
11 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
16.5M records analyzed
About Zomato
Zomato is a major Indian restaurant-discovery and food-delivery platform serving millions of users.
Why They Hold Your Data
Restaurant-discovery and food-delivery platforms collect customer identity, phone numbers, addresses, payment-adjacent data, order history, and dining behavior across marketplace and logistics workflows.
Recent Developments
Zomato attributed the breach to a compromised employee development account and worked with the hacker, who withdrew the data from sale.
Data Points Exposed
3 verified field types
Email Address
Password High
Username
Breach Impact
Salted-MD5 passwords are partly recoverable, exposing reused credentials to stuffing; Zomato’s password scheme with per-user salt and multiple iterations slowed but did not eliminate cracking.
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 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).
N
Threat Actor: NclayConfidence: Medium
Motivation: Financial gain, notoriety
A hacker identified as a leader within the GnosticPlayers group, tied to 2019 mega-breach sales; claimed the GateHub compromise and sold Zomato user data on a criminal marketplace.
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