Minecraft Hack Exposes Seven Million Passwords

Minecraft is such  wildly popular game that to simply call it ‘popular’ is to wildly understate the situation. Which is why there are a lot of people who need to read this article; because the private data of seven million Minecraft accounts has been stolen in a major hack.

“Hacking never changes.” Wait, wrong game…

Minecraft site Lifeboat is a multiplayer community that allows players of the smartphone version of the game to play other versions of the game.

Such a major hack is certainly newsworthy, which is why you may be surprised to find that the hack occurred back in January and is only becoming public now. The news broke after Computer Security expert Troy Hunt claimed to have received the user email list via someone who trades in stolen information. Lifeboat apparently quickly became aware of the breach and hoped to deal with it quietly. According to Sky News;

“In a statement given to Motherboard, Lifeboat alleged it had limited any potential damage by covertly compelling users to reset their passwords.

‘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,’ a spokesman told the site.”

If you are a member of the Lifeboat community and you haven’t reset your password recently, now might be a good time.

Joe Morgan

An avid gamer since Nintendo vs Sega was a thing, Joe hopes to one day be a game designer himself.

When he’s not working on his design document for his planned ‘Joe is awesome’ RPG, he spends his time writing, going to track days and going to his local cinema.