Hacker steals 6.5 million accounts from Yu-Gi-Oh clone

A hacker allegedly used a vulnerability in MySQL to steal 6.5 million emails and poorly encrypted passwords from Dueling Network, a card game in the style of Yu-Gi-Oh, announced Motherboard.

The website”s forum has been kept online, although Dueling Network was shut down in 2016 following a cease-and-desist order. The request was made by a law firm on behalf of the animation company holding the rights to Yu-Gi-Oh.

“Only our forum site was still up as a way for our users to communicate with each other (login used DN [Dueling Network] credentials),” an administrator wrote in an email to Motherboard. “Now that is down and warns users to change passwords on any other sites they may have used the same password on.”

The passwords were hashed with the MD5 algorithm, known to have extensive vulnerabilities that allow hackers to get plaintext passwords. A company administrator said not all stolen emails and passwords are associated with individual players, as some accounts appear to be duplicates.

“At the moment, the claim that information has been breached for 6.5 DN million accounts appears to be accurate,” the email reads. “Note that many accounts are duplicates owned by the same user or were never actually logged in, so this number is inflated.”

Users who had player accounts on Dueling Network and reused the passwords are advised to immediately change them for all accounts linked, as hackers may breach them.