Hackers RSVPed ‘Yes’ to Breaching 100M+ Evite Accounts

People all over the world use social planning platform Evite to create, send and manage online invitations for their events. One invitation the company didn’t intend to send? Open access to an inactive data storage file containing information from nearly 101 million user accounts.

Evite recently announced that, in April 2019, it became aware of a data security incident involving potential unauthorized access to its systems. The company worked with a data security firm and forensic consultants to launch a thorough investigation, which confirmed that an unauthorized party had indeed accessed the data storage file, beginning in February 2019.

According to Evite, hackers gained access to user information from 2013 and earlier, which included names, usernames, email addresses, passwords, as well as dates of birth, phone numbers and mailing addresses from users who opted to provide that information to Evite.

The company confirmed that no social security numbers or financial data were accessed in this incident.

What happened to the exposed user data?

ZDNet reported that a hacker named Gnosticplayers posted customer data from six companies, including Evite, up for sale on the dark web on April 15. This user claimed to be selling 10 million Evite user records with full names, email addresses, IP addresses and cleartext passwords. Although Evite did not respond to ZDNet’s report of the dark web sale at the time, it did address the full scope of the incident in its security notification.

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What has Evite done since the incident?

Following the incident, Evite worked with security professionals to address the vulnerabilities that led to the unauthorized access. The company contacted the affected users directly and instructed all users to change their passwords upon next login.

The security update from Evite also explained that the company will continue to enhance their system to detect and prevent unauthorized access. It will also continue monitoring for suspicious activity and coordinate with appropriate law enforcement agencies if needed.

What should I do if I think my data was exposed?

Think you’ve been impacted by the Evite data breach? While it’s a cybersecurity best practice to use a unique password for every online account you own, password reuse does happen frequently. The most important thing you can do (after changing your Evite password) is to update your password on any account where you had reused the exposed password.

Beyond that, Evite made the following recommendations for all its customers in its announcement:

• Review your accounts for any suspicious activity.
• Be cautious of unsolicited messages asking for personal data, either directly or through a website link.
• Don’t click links or download attachments from suspicious emails.

Finally, you can run a dark web search to find out if your personal data may have been exposed in recent breaches, including the Evite incident.