Social Bluebook was hacked, exposing 217,000 influencers’ accounts

A social media platform used to match advertisers with thousands of influencers has been hacked.

Social Bluebook, a Los Angeles-based company, allows advertisers to pay social media “influencers” for posts that promote their products and services. The company claims it has some 300,000 influencers on its books.

But at some point during October 2019, the company’s entire back-end database was taken in a data breach.

TechCrunch obtained the database, containing some 217,000 user accounts — including influencer names, email addresses, and passwords hashed, which had been scrambled using the strong SHA-2 hashing algorithm.

It’s not known how the database was exfiltrated from the company’s systems.

We contacted several users who, when presented with their information, confirmed it as accurate. We also provided a portion of the data to Social Bluebook co-founder Sam Michie, who confirmed the data breach.

“We have just now become aware of this data breach that occurred in October 2019,” he told TechCrunch in an email Thursday.

He said affected users will be informed of the breach by email. The company also informed the California attorney general’s office of the breach, per state law.

Social media influencers are a constant target for hackers, which target their accounts to hijack their online handles or follower count. Some influencers have relied on white-hat hackers to get their hijacked accounts back.

Last year, a social media firm left a database of Instagram influencers online, which included phone numbers and email addresses scraped from their profiles.

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