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

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[–] 444 points 1 year ago* (13 children)
  • admitted the issue immediately

  • reassured users as to actual scope of breach, probable risk

  • provided recommended actions for users who think they may be impacted.

  • explained best-practices (enough for a laymen's audience) and how they limited scope and impact.

  • did not deflect blame

My god....I've got to hand it to plex. This is the perfect incident response letter. Love 'em or hate 'em, this is a good example for other CISOs.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, I have to agree. When a breach occurs (and it happens to just about every organization at some point or another) a press release this honest, responsible and immediate is not really the norm. I see this as a show of competence on the security front and integrity for the company as a whole.

    I do wish Plex wasn't further enshitifying their product more with every release, but that's a different issue.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Fully agree. There is no time and space to play the blame game, as it simply does not matter at this point. React swiftly and be transparent. You are free to invest months afterwards for investigations and followups

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    I mean I don’t understand the accolades for literally just following the law.

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  • [–] 81 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You can follow the law and still screw up the response/announcement pretty badly, and so many do not even manage that much.

    So yeah. It’s satisfying when someone acts both professionally and conscientiously in a situation like this.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    They didn't provide any real timelines, unless I missed something. Trust me bro, we shut it down real fast.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I don't understand what the difference would be. The damage is done and they notified people of those damages.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Well, if it said "The attacker gained access to systems in October 2023 and we patched out the vulnerability during March 2025," you'd be asking why it took so long to discover the intrusion and why they didn't let us know for six months?

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    They admitted the issue because they're a German company and they would get fined 20 million euros if they didn't.

    Edit: I was wrong, it's not German

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  • [–] 106 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I guess I'm going to find out if they really deleted my user data when I asked them to

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    So far I haven't gotten any email from them. I'll try to login later with my old username and password.

    EDIT: Tried and they said username or password is incorrect. Since I'm using a password manager I'm confident those were what I used so maybe they really did delete it.

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  • [–] 145 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I harbor a strong dislike for the profiteers at Plex but their security incident response is textbook correct. Good job security dudes! The rest of your stupid company should listen to you more often.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Overall I agree, but not requiring users to change password when the hashes were taken is a bit too soft IMO.

    It will also be interesting to see if they make a public disclosure about the specifics of who and how. They also don't specifically define if media watched data was included or excluded.

    Either way, happy I migrated to Jellyfin.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    I do think they missed a bit about password reuse, since they tell you to reset the password on their site, you should be changing the password on any other sites where you reused it. But yeah, not arguing about it being good otherwise.

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    [–] 66 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I think that’s a pretty good response. More details will probably emerge in the next few days that could change my mind, but for now that gives me a bit of confidence in their platform.

    In comparison, a few years ago I was a patient at an IVF clinic in Sydney. I saw some absolutely bonkers security and repeatedly raised it with them. They wouldn’t hear it, and almost expectedly they were hacked and now my sperm count is public information. Their response was delayed and appalling. If my medical records were treated a severely as a streaming platform, I would have been happy.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    So what's your count, bro? Save me the trouble of looking it up myself and all.

    I kid but the serious lack of security in medical isn't just in Australia. I'm just a construction worker with an interest in networking and such but I see blatant violations nearly every job I'm on.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    I checked, their sperm count is over 300 million, I'm pretty sure I got pregnant reading it.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago

    I think you mean Plex got hacked AGAIN

    lol

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  • [–] 192 points 1 year ago (28 children)

    Man. My decision to go with Jellyfin just keeps paying off more and more

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  • [–] 126 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    No doubt. Why do you need an account on their servers to use a server on your own hardware? So dumb.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The second I saw that I immediately looked for alternatives and abandoned plans to have my own Plex server. I knew it would enshittify fast when they can lock you out of your own server

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    For me.. my server software is running. But the account doesn't see it. And as such I can't claim my server to get it back up and running.

    Fun times. Glad I changed my password. :/

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If you just changed your password and now you don't have access... Directly connect to the server http://:32400/web and you'll get the setup prompt to connect it back to your account.

    If that doesn't work you can restart the server and try again (should catch up that it's unauth'd). Or run a tool like https://github.com/ChuckPa/UserCredentialReset to reset it so you can reauth it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Thanks for that second link.. I'll give it a try.

    I've done nearly everything I can think of to get it sorted.

    Out side of jellyfin. That said. I'm going to spin up a container of jellyfin tonight. This has absolutely taught me that Plex is a huge point of failure for my media consumption.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (19 children)

    Y hope you know how to harden jellyfinn, because they are not better than plex team....

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Jellyfin dev team is not in charge of your self hosted security though. You know what you are getting, source code available, and it's up to you setting the security.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    But they are responsible for the unsecured / gruyere cheese product they ship.

    Jellyfinn has a lot of holes and it is easy to deploy it in a insecure way by not techie people. Last time I checked they even didn't have a recommended practices for hardening it

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Not techie people are not going to be able to open it for internet access. If you have the knowledge to set a internet available service you should have the knowledge to be able to provide basic security.

    Most security issues with jellyfin are an issue only for a specific type of user. The one who is selling access to their server. The worst Jellyfin security issue makes selling access to your server a higher risk situation.

    I hope someday those issues would get patched, but I get why there are other priorities for the dev team right now, about issues that bother to a bigger majority of jellyfin users.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, when I was talking about not techie people I didn't mean technology analphabets, everybody can open a port in your consumer router with the help of chatgpt, not everybodies is able to realizes they need a reverse proxy with tls and modify the headers for the Auth....

    Being secure in internet is like the herd inmunity for corona times, your system could be fairly secure, but if you are hammered with several bot nets it is going to be a challenge, and there is responsabiity is shipping a product that is easy to be infected.

    And your third paragraph really confirms why this post is necessary

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Have to point a dns to the ip, buy a domain, stablish ddns. I don't see it happening often. If you know all that you are ought to know about getting hitm

    Bot hits are not a problem for jellyfin. The main problem right now is unauthorized access to endpoints for people who know the hash that is being used in that endpoint.

    It's a targeted attack that hampers availability of the services (making it more available than it should be). It doesn't make internet more insecure or anything.

    As I said previously I haven't actually known of any of these attacks happening on the wild. As they are kinda hard of pull of. You need to know the precisely hash used for the endpoint, the most normal way of knowing that without being an authorized user is because you used to be an authorized user and you are not anymore. That's weird in jellyfin current ecosystem. People say that the hash could be calculated by a complete outsider, but I have never seen anyone pulling it off on the wild. You need to know a lot of things about the service you are attacking to be able to do it.

    So, yes is a security vulnerability, all software have those. But I think it gets blown out of proportion often.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

    My Jellyfin is behind a Crowdsec + Cloudflare proxy with geoblocking and other protections + Reverse Proxy with additional protections, in a rootless Docker container with no access to the Docker socket, and has only access to a mounted folder which contains just downloaded movies and shows. The effort to break in is high, the reward very low.

    But the most important difference between Jellyfin and Plex is that neither Jellyfin devs nor Jellyfin instances have any personal or credit card information from their users, and therefore are way less a problem if hacked into.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Good to read you know how to implement some protection layers around your jellyfinn :)

    But most of the people (specially the plex ones) don't have the technical background to deploy something like you have, and convince those people to do the switch without knowing how to protect themselves is not a wise thing to do. Specially when this time, plex response was perfectly fine :)

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    But most of the people (specially the plex ones) don't have the technical background

    Seems weird to say, because I had to setup Plex one time on a server for testing and it was a bit harder than setting up Jellyfin, so I wouldn't call most Plex hosters dumb.

    Plus they are still hosting something on their servers, they would still need to secure it in some ways?

    p.s., the "Jellyfin is insecure dont host it on the internet" is just fear mongering at this point..

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Jellyfinn has a nice record of problems during the authentication and escalating privileges, even the developer team recommends to use it behind a vpn and don't expose it to internet.

    If course, you can use a reverse proxy with and external Auth framework to mitigate it, pair it with fail2ban, geo restrictions and a second factor, but those things are not in the scope of the regular user.

    Let's face reality, plex is not such widespread for being the default option in kali Linux....

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think the only advice I have seen is to use jellyfin behind a reverse proxy (instead of directly exposing it), because they are hardened.

    Where have you seen this official advice for a vpn?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Hm, I'm not so certain that they are stating you should be using a VPN, I think they were addressing someone who was quite concerned and a VPN does mitigate all concerns usually, so it's simple and common advice for them folk to hand out.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I already answered your second paragraph: Jellyfin holds no sensible data.

    And there is no central server gathering data from all users, an hacker would need to find and break in multiple Jellyfin instances, to get useless data from 1 to maybe 10 users each time.

    And Plex is not easier to install and secure than Jellyfin.

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  • Sometimes your data is not important but your computer, nobody wants to be in a netbot.

    Well, perhaps plex is not better in security (we don't know for sure) but at least they have a cyber team, a monitoring system and in every bodies hope, dedicated developers for these topics.

    Jellyfinn dies not hve a team like this one per se. Could the developers be better fit and knowledged in jellyfinn than plex? Perhaps, but probably the focus is in the features and not in the security

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Every year Jellyfin improves and Plex further enshittifies. You’re fighting against the tide here.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    ???

    This is not about enshitification. The best user friendly app can be a security nightmare and an utterly crap can be rock solid.

    It is not about that, not even development models or just rock star programmers.

    It is about who has a performing security team and who doesn't.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    None of Jellyfin’s security issues affect me.

    All of Plex’s shit does.

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    [–] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    This isn't the first time they've been breached, there was an incident in 2015 and 2022 as well. From what I can gather its the same info being gathered each time.

    There might be others but I can't find th at the moment.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Really that often? I guess their good and quick response has been engineered through lots of experience...

    At some point, can you keep yourself using a service that constantly gets breached? I'd just be worried when the next one is coming, based on this record (that i havent verified for myself, gonna trust u bro).

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  • [–] 86 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    Jellyfin advertisement 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    I enjoy using Jellyfin and hope it continues to improve, but it has some problematic security of its own.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    But if you just run it locally an a media server in your home, and you don't expose the service to the internet, that doesn't really matter? Though perhaps more people connect to their Jellyfin instances remotely than I realize.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Well. If you're not streaming why have such a service in the first place? If I didn't stream remotely with Plex (and share with my friends and family) I'd just go back to running Kodi on my htpc like I did ten years ago.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Stuff like this can happen to any app, developers are only human, shit happens. A bigger company is a bigger target for hackers, so there is some saftey in an open source app that's not as popular, but then again a bigger company also has more resources to monitor for security breaches and quickly address them and push out a hot fix, can't say I know how this works for free open source apps

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think the point here is that Jellyfin doesn't have a centralized login or website like Plex does. An attacker would have to know about your server and log into it directly to get access. If you run it in a container, there isn't a lot they can do other than trashing your media library, which you should have protected with filesystem snapshots anyway.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Jellyfin doesn't even have write access to my files. If they can get access into the container's process then I guess they could add stuff to the web interface which could contain bad stuff.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    That's also a viable solution, but for me I just use Btrfs snapshots on my NAS. My files are stored on a different device and the Jellyfin container only sees them as a mounted dir, not even aware that it's an SMB mount.

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