Minecraft Hack Exposes 71,000 User Accounts

A cyberattack is believed to have taken place on fan website Minecraft World Map in January, resulting in the theft of some 71,000 user accounts and IP addresses, announced security expert Troy Hunt.

The popular game site was vulnerable because account owners not only used weak passwords, but also reused some from other websites. The leaked information contains usernames, passwords, IP addresses and emails of community members who used the website to share game progress.

This is not the first time Minecraft has fallen victim to a cyberattack. Seven million passwords were stolen and put up for sale on the dark web in January following an attack on the game”s servers. The breach was allegedly left unreported.

“When this happened (in) early January we figured the best thing for our players was to quietly force a password reset without letting the hackers know they had limited time to act. We have not received any reports of anyone being damaged by this,” a spokesman told the site.

Another hacker group, OurMine, went after the creators of Minecraft in July who used cookies stolen from the site to breach user accounts. OurMine is the group behind the attacks on the social media accounts of Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

With over 100 million downloads in seven years, Minecraft remains one of the hit construction games on the market.