Vimeo points finger at analytics supplier Anodot, says no logins or card data were touched
More than 119,000 Vimeo users's email addresses were extracted in a breach traced to a third-party analytics vendor, according to Have I Been Pwned.
The incident first surfaced in April when the ShinyHunters crew added Vimeo to its growing "pay or leak" hit list, claiming it had pulled hundreds of gigabytes of data and threatening to dump the lot unless a deal was struck.
That dump has since landed, and breach notification service Have I Been Pwned now puts a number on at least part of the fallout: 119,000 unique email addresses, in some cases paired with names.
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Vimeo last week confirmed that data was taken, but stopped short of saying how many people were affected. The company pinned the incident on Anodot, a third-party analytics provider used across its systems, and said the attacker gained access via that integration rather than breaking into Vimeo directly.
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Anodot has not said anything publicly, but its status page shows the incident kicked off on April 4.
According to Vimeo, the stolen databases were heavy on technical data, video titles, metadata, and some customer email addresses. The company has been keen to stress what was not included: no actual video content, no valid login credentials, and no payment card information.
That does not make the data harmless. Email lists like this get reused, resold, and recycled into phishing runs for years, especially when they come with enough context to make a message look convincing.
The attackers, for their part, claim the breach went deeper. In a post seen by The Register, ShinyHunters alleged that "Snowflake and BigQuery instances data was compromised thanks to Anodot.com," adding that the company "failed to reach an agreement" despite multiple attempts to negotiate.
Vimeo says it has cut off the problem at the source, disabling Anodot credentials, ripping out the integration, and bringing in outside security help while notifying law enforcement. The investigation is ongoing, and the company says it will update customers as it learns more.
For now, the numbers from Have I Been Pwned seem to fill in the gap left by Vimeo's initial disclosure, and underline a familiar problem: you can lock down your own systems, but your vendors only have to slip once. ®