The Tribeca Festival suffered a data leak that exposed hundreds of thousands of records, as well as the contact information for thousands of celebrities, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jennifer Lawrence, Angelina Jolie and festival co-founder Robert De Niro.
Cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler revealed the leak in an ExpressVPN blog post over the weekend, claiming he’d uncovered a total of 666,369 exposed records with timestamps ranging from 2019 to 2026. Fowler, who works for Black Hills Information Security, publishes blogs on ExpressVPN and previously did cybersecurity for a software company in Kyiv, Ukraine, took time away from his European vacation to speak with Variety about discovering the data leak.
“I’ve been a security researcher for about 15 years and I’m always looking for exposed data,” he says. “I’ve used a lot of different APIs and tools. This one I found using an IoT search engine, which is basically Google for websites but for connected devices like nanny cams, medical equipment or cloud storage databases.”
Co-founded in 2002 by De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff as a way to revitalize Lower Manhattan following the September 11 attacks, the fest takes place annually in New York City, and has played host to the premieres of everything from “The Avengers” to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” while awarding films like “Let the Right One In.” Tribeca Festival’s 2026 edition, marking its 25th anniversary, ran from June 3-14.
