We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure.
What happened
An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication data.
Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party. Out of an abundance of caution, we recommend you take some additional steps to secure your account (see details below). Rest assured that we do not store credit card data on our servers, so this information was not compromised in this incident.
What we’re doing
We’ve already addressed the method that this third party used to gain access to the system, and we’re undergoing additional reviews to ensure that the security of all of our systems is further strengthened to prevent future attacks.
What you must do
If you use a password to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you reset your Plex account password immediately by visiting https://plex.tv/reset. When doing so, there’s a checkbox to “Sign out connected devices after password change,” which we recommend you enable. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in with your new password.
If you use SSO to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you log out of all active sessions by visiting https://plex.tv/security and clicking the button that says ”Sign out of all devices”. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in as normal.
Additional Security Measures You Can Take
We remind you that no one at Plex will ever reach out to you over email to ask for a password or credit card number for payments. For further account protection, we also recommend enabling two-factor authentication on your Plex account if you haven’t already done so.
Lastly, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this situation may cause you. We take pride in our security systems, which helped us quickly detect this incident, and we want to assure you that we are working swiftly to prevent potential future incidents from occurring.
For step-by-step instructions on how to reset your password, visit:https://support.plex.tv/articles/account-requires-password-reset
In some ways 2fa is a weak spot even disregarding recovery processes being open to social engineering, now you’re giving a verified identifier uniquely tied to you
I generate unique email addresses and passwords for every account but can’t realistically do that with phone numbers
2fa by sms or voice isn’t especially secure anyway since you’re open to sim attacks and social engineering. I have a lot more hope for Passkeys but don’t really trust the practical advice arts of managing them yet
…second phone number…
Anyways… we are digressing here,
at this point it’s a lot like protecting anything in life: prevention and making yourself less tasty to a psycho.
If you’ve set it even two step You’re already doing way more than any user they are probably intending this warning to do more to protect themselves who set their password to “password” or phrases haven’t changed it in decades and would even prefer to publicly post their passwords on social willing to give up their entire savings rather than having to do anything further as if technology is too beyond and suddenly so super complex that they have to use different keys on their keyboard other than letters.
You don’t have to apply every threat like it’s calculus in a situation where there are people who are scared of even doing basic sums.
This situation was hashtags. And all they are asking is to rehash it. And here you are already disposing of the 2nd feature after that.
Of course but it doesn’t scale. I’m currently up to 182 unique generated email addresses to help keep my online accounts a little more secure. But they all go through one or two phone numbers, leaving me more open to sim attacks, social engineering and data aggregation