500px Photo Sharing Site Says It Was Hacked In 2018

Photo-sharing community 500px said Tuesday it recently discovered a breach of its system last summer that exposed personal data on all of its users.

The July 2018 hack, which was discovered Saturday, yielded user information such as users’ first and last names, 500px usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords, the site told users Tuesday. If users provided their birth date, local region or gender information when they registered, that information is also affected, the site said.

“If you were a 500px user on or prior to July 5, 2018, you have been affected,” 500px said in a blog post. “Our engineers are closely monitoring our platform and we’ve found no evidence to date of any recurrence of this issue.”

500px said its investigation has shown no evidence individual users’ accounts or other personal data such as credit card information were accessed. As a precaution, 500px said it’s requiring all users to reset their account passwords.

The hack appears to have occurred less than two weeks after 500px, which has been transforming itself into an image-licensing business, announced it was backing away from a framework that let people freely share their photos with others. The site’s announcement that it would disable the ability for people to upload or download photos shared under Creative Commons licenses didn’t sit well with many users.

500px, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, said last year it had more than 13 million registered users.

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