Our engineering team recently learned of a potential security issue affecting your 500px user account. We are taking this issue extremely seriously and have taken immediate action to address the situation and ensure protection of our users’ data. Although there is no indication of unauthorized access to your account, as a precautionary measure, we require you to reset your 500px account password.
What happened?
On February 8, 2019, our engineering team became aware of a potential security issue affecting certain user profile data. We immediately launched a comprehensive review of our systems to understand the nature and scope of the issue. We engaged a third-party expert to assist us in our investigation and are coordinating with law enforcement authorities on this matter.
Based on our investigation to date, we believe that an unauthorized party gained access to our systems and acquired partial user data on approximately July 5, 2018. We’ve concluded this issue affected certain information that users provided when filling out their user profiles, as listed below. Our engineers are closely monitoring our platform and we’ve found no evidence to date of any recurrence of this issue.
What personal data may have been affected?
Your first and last name as entered on 500px
Your 500px username
The email address associated with your 500px login
A hash of your password, which is hashed using a one-way cryptographic algorithm
Your city, state/province, country, if provided
Your birth date, if provided
Your gender, if provided
At this time, there is no indication of unauthorized access to your account, and no evidence that other data associated with your user profile was affected, such as
credit card information (which is not stored on our servers), if used to make any purchases, or any other sensitive personal information.
Given the nature of the personal data involved, we are alerting you to this matter so you can take steps to help protect yourself against the risk of phishing, spam, and other misuse of your information as a result of this issue.
In addition, if you have not changed your password on 500px since October 2012, there is a risk that your hashed password could be reverse-engineered to allow an unauthorized party to compromise your 500px account. The sections below provide information on the steps taken to protect your account, as well as further instructions for you.
What actions have we taken to protect your information?
Given the potential risk to password security, we have already reset your password to protect your data, and require you to create another.
We have vetted access to our servers, databases, and other sensitive data-storage services.
We have and are continuing to monitor our source code, both public-facing and internal, to protect against security issues.
We are partnering with leading experts in cyber security to further secure our website, mobile apps, internal systems, and security processes.
We are modifying our internal software development process.
We are continuing to upgrade our network infrastructure.
We recommend that you change your password on any other website or app on which you use a password that is the same as or similar to your password for your 500px account.
We take the security of your information extremely seriously, and we sincerely apologize with regret that this issue occurred. Going forward, we will continue to enhance our security measures to help keep your data safe, as well as implement additional measures to help prevent this type of incident from reoccurring.
If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our Support team. We’re on standby to help.
- 500px
