Breach Disclosure: Peatix

Peatix, an event organizing platform, disclosed a data breach on 17 November 2020. This breach exposed the data of more than 4.2 million users, which included full names, usernames, emails, and salted hashed passwords.

Recommendations

Enable 2-factor authentication for all of your organizational accounts to help mitigate phishing and credential stuffing attacks
If not already enabled, turn on the compromised credentials rule for all relevant entities and ensure relevant emails are entered for those entities, or reach out to [email protected] for assistance
If one of your entities receives an alert, ZeroFOX recommends immediate password changes for the affected account

Details

Peatix was compromised through unknown means in January 2019, which has been attributed to the hacker group ShinyHunters. Peatix formally acknowledged the breach on November 17th, with a statement including the full details of what data was exposed:

"...Upon further investigation, it has been confirmed that information, including names, email addresses, salted and hashed versions of passwords, nicknames, preferred languages, and countries and time zones where the accounts were created, about some of our users was involved."

Peatix stated that they have since removed access to the database and are continuing to investigate the incident with the help of external security firms. Typically the postings on hacking forums advertising don't include generalized statistics of the breached data, however, in this posting, the author included the breakdown of email providers that were seen in the breach.

Figure 1: Peatix breach advertisement on RaidForums