Contest.co.nz

In November 2019 the New Zealand competition community website Contest.co.nz suffered a significant data breach. An unauthorized party managed to compromise the forum database resulting in the exposure of approximately 160 thousand user records. The leaked information includes personal identifiers such as nicknames and IP addresses alongside sensitive security credentials. The passwords were stored using the MD5 hashing algorithm with a salt which is considered cryptographically weak by modern standards. This incident allowed attackers to potentially access user accounts and gather data on participants of various New Zealand based contests and lucky draws hosted on the platform.