Elance Data Breach

What happened

Sometime in 2009, staffing platform Elance suffered a data breach that impacted 1.3 million accounts. Appearing online 8 years later, the data contained usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and SHA1 hashes of passwords, amongst other personal data.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Change your Elance password immediately, and update it anywhere you reused the same password.
• Enable two-factor authentication on the affected account and on your critical services (email, banking).
• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing Elance — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Stay alert for smishing (SMS phishing) and SIM-swap attempts using your phone number.
• Check whether your email address appears in this breach on haveibeenpwned.com.