BookMate

In mid-2018 the electronic book subscription service Bookmate suffered a significant data breach. An unauthorized third party successfully gained access to the platform database resulting in the exposure of sensitive user information. The compromised data included nearly four million unique records. Security analysis revealed that the breach contained personal identifiers and security credentials. Specifically the data set featured email addresses along with user names gender and birth dates. Passwords were also compromised but they were stored as SHA-512 hashes with salt which provides a higher level of protection than plain text or MD5 but still remains vulnerable to high-performance cracking attempts.