Statement on Security Incident at Freepik Company

We have recently notified all affected users of a security breach in Freepik Company, affecting Freepik and Flaticon. The security breach was due to a SQL injection in Flaticon that allowed an attacker to get some user’s information from our database.

We immediately notified the competent authorities of the breach, and in our forensic analysis, we determined that an attacker extracted the email and, when available, the hash of the password of the oldest 8.3M users. To clarify, the hash of the password is not the password, and can not be used to log into your account.

Out of these 8.3M users, 4.5M had no hashed password because they used exclusively federated logins (with Google, Facebook and/or Twitter), and the only data the attacker obtained from these users was their email address.

For the remaining 3.77M users the attacker got their email address and a hash of their password. For 3.55M of these users, the method to hash the password is bcrypt, and for the remaining 229K users the method was salted MD5. Since then we have updated the hash of all users to bcrypt.

Those who had a password hashed with salted MD5 got their password canceled and have received an email to urge them to choose a new password and to change their password if it was shared with any other site (a practice that is strongly discouraged). Users who got their password hashed with bcrypt received an email suggesting them to change their password, especially if it was an easy to guess password. Users who only had their email leaked were notified, but no special action is required from them.

You can verify if your email and / or password have been compromised on any leak with the great Have I Been Pwned project: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

We regularly review emails and passwords leaked on the net, and if we find they match the credentials of any users on Freepik / Flaticon, we disable the password and notify the owner that they need to update their credentials.

Due to this incident, we have greatly extended our engagement with external security consultants and did a full review with a first-class agency of our external and internal security measures. We took some important short term measures to increase our security and have planned medium and long term extra security measures. 

While no system is 100% secure, this should not have happened and we apologize for this leak.