Learn More. In the research covering 5,000 social game players in the US and UK, PopCap Games and Information Solutions Group found that the average social gamer is a 43-year old woman. Zynga Games List Founded in 2007 with the aim to connect people all over the world through their games they have created some of the most popular titles in casual gaming including the Farmville series and Words with Friends. “The security of our player data is extremely important to us. First, lets break them down by year: We can clearly see that the vast majority of users last visit dates were in 2014 – Zynga’s first quarter results for 2014 showed that daily active user numbers fell from 53 million to 28 million year-over-year, so we can make an assumption that this was a pretty devastating year for Zynga. Eastern Europe’s numbers are much smaller – in this case we can run analysis only on Russia – Russia would consume a mere 0.09% of the entire user base if compared with records including duplicates and 0.13% of the entire user base if compared with records without duplicates. If you used the same password on other sites, make sure to update those passwords as well. Your email address will not be published. To what extent is the social gamer’s data safety a priority for such franchise giants, if 218 million accounts could be hacked and 26 million accounts could be decrypted in a 2-month period? Zynga acknowledged the breach in September 2019 – in total, the data breach contains 206,267,210 records including duplicates and 150,363,954 records without duplicates. And to be very clear, finding hacked databases doesn’t require neither extraordinary skills, nor knowledge, just simple genuine curiosity. The Zynga breach happened in September 2019 following the official statement of the company on September 12. Data breach list The total count of data breaches is 105. As already mentioned above, due to its design, this hash is resilient to cracking, so further damage was avoided. Next. CherryServers - Bare Metal Cloud for DevOps Engineers, InnoDB From the Inside: ibdata1 and the Log Files, Optimizing MySQL Query Performance with DESCRIBE and EXPLAIN, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, Discontinued, once was assigned to East Germany, United States (New York, excluding Manhattan). Even if you haven’t been found hacked, it would be a good practice to change your login password, and ideally to update the password for your email address used to register/sign-up to the game. NortonLifeLock recommends that players who think their accounts may have been accessed during the Zynga data breach to change their passwords, and if they use the same password for other accounts, change those too. This is not unusual. Following that, Hacker News released an article which confirmed that the breach was executed by the famous hacker Gnosticplayers, who holds the record of a hacker with the biggest number of breached information, claims to possess hacked data of other Zynga-developed games as well, namely Draw Something and OMGPOP jointly affecting 7 million users. Zynga, a … Surveys, quizzes, etc. The breach compromised the personal information (including Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and in some cases drivers’ license numbers) of 143 million consumers; 209,000 consumers also had their credit card data exposed. Compromised data. A federal judge has ordered Zynga Inc app users to give the company's lawyers information associated with their accounts to help determine whether the users' data breach claims belong in arbitration. In September 2019, ... As of 2012, Zynga's list of available games includes board game versions of Draw Something, a CityVille edition of Monopoly, Words with Friends, and several kids' "Animal Games" based on FarmVille. Are we in the age of surveillance capitalism? Zynga and its employees will never ask for your login information. Zynga acknowledged the breach in September 2019 – in total, the data breach contains 206,267,210 records including duplicates and 150,363,954 records without duplicates. Zynga, developer of popular mobile games Words with Friends and Draw Something, is the target of a proposed class-action lawsuit filed by FeganScott on behalf of players affected by a data breach. At the time, the hacker claimed to have gained access to the accounts of 218 million Zynga users including passwords and personal information. The company has a mission to “connect the world through video games”. Use this site for requests related to your personal data. The survey was conducted with individuals who play games on social networking sites and platforms at least once a week. According to Breach Report’s analysts the unique email-password combinations, those not found in the known breach databases, make 84.38% of the Zynga file, specifically 22,010,529 lines of user data. Breach date: October 16, 2019. Data Breach - Zynga Games HackedEver played Words with Friends, Farmville, Zynga poker, Draw Something, or any other Zynga game? The rest of 4,072,991 lines (15.62%) are repeated email-password combinations. Change the password of the compromised account at Words with Friends. It is followed by hotmail123, 123456789 1234567, and 123456. The breach was discovered on July 29, but the company says that it likely started in mid-May. Before we get to the content of the database, let’s dive into the Zynga user demographics a bit. The database is available to the average Joe who has a few spare hours to download and look through the Words with Friends user list. Exclusive — Hacker Steals Over 218 Million Zynga 'Words with Friends' Gamers Data September 29, 2019 Swati Khandelwal A Pakistani hacker who previously made headlines earlier this year for selling almost a billion user records stolen from nearly 45 popular online services has now claimed to have hacked the popular mobile social game company Zynga Inc . Now we can also take a look at the last visit dates including months: Alongside email addresses, registration and last visit dates, Zynga also stored phone numbers allowing us to glance at the country calling codes to make further assumptions where Zynga users were based: We can see that the most prevalent area code was “3” – it had over 164 million records, so the best guess here would be that this area code was assigned to another area too. Data Enrichment Exposure From Pdl Customer SD. More than 170m usernames and passwords were stolen from the company behind Words With Friends in a hack this year, according to a breach monitoring site. Zynga Data Breach Has Comprised Over 172 Million Accounts Zynga, a famous social game developer of games like FarmVille, CastleVille, Hit It Rich, Zynga Poker, etc, was hacked this year with specifically being hit on one of its games Words With Friends. The SHA-1 encryption algorithm has a bad reputation among cyber security experts as it has been theoretically broken in 2005 and in later successfully attacked in the real world cases. Popular social game developer Zynga has reportedly become the latest victim of a massive data breach impacting some 218 million Words with Friends accounts.. On … Still developing games and with a … Your email address will not be published. We are working hard to address this matter and remain committed to supporting our community…” — Zynga.com Player Security Announcement, On December 15th 2019, a new Zynga data dump including more than 26 million email-password combinations in plain text started circling around the popular hacker forums. The decrypted part of Zynga database contains exactly 26,083,520 clear text email-password combinations. Publisher Zynga announced there was a data breach of account login info for Draw Something and Words with Friends players on Sept. 12. Data Potentially Compromised: The stolen information revealed to the news site by the hacker, reportedly included names, email addresses, login IDs, hashed (scrambled) passwords, Zynga account IDs, and in some cases, phone numbers and Facebook IDs. Originally published at https://breachreport.com/news on December 21, 2019. IMMEDIATELY change the password of the compromised email address. The company was founded in April 2007 with headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States. We can also look at the months of registration: Now we can take a glance at the last visit dates. The Words with Friends team used SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) encryption algorithm to store user information, unfortunately it didn’t take long for the clear text file to appear on the dark web hacking forums. We strive for a better understanding of our players which translates into challenges and features that delight them and increased social engagement within our games. A Zynga spokesperson said on Thursday that the company would not be commenting beyond that September statement. Although Zynga acknowledged the breach at the end of September, several weeks after hackers struck, notification site HaveIBeenPwned now has the official figure on how many accounts were affected. San Francisco-based social game developer grows in staggering rates over the years, reporting 48.04% increase in year-over-year third quarter revenue in 2019, of $345.3 million. The total count of records is 7,711,388,203. Data breach. Keep in mind that this number could be significantly higher if we would run the analysis on all email domains. in exchange for free in-game items. It claimed in an update late last week that a total of 172.9 million unique email addresses, along with usernames and passwords, were compromised in the attack. Discovery: The breach notification suggests that Zynga itself didn't initially identify the data theft, but was rather informed of it by a third party. Zynga will never send messages that require you to open attachments, nor do we permit our partners and affiliates to do so. News Zynga Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Data Breach Tuesday’s lawsuit seeks to certify a subclass of young users of the company’s social … (Note that in some cases the organization that sent the notice is not the one that experienced the breach. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Zynga also stored passwords hashed and salted with the SHA1DASH algorithm, which, due to the design of the hash, is very difficult to crack. As Zynga’s player security announcement states, “cyber attacks are one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today”, nevertheless, the extent to which certain data leaks harm internet users strongly depends on a company’s choice of security protocols of handling user’s sensitive information. Founded in 2007, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with locations in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, India, Turkey and Finland. Zynga interactive entertainment company is famous for its FarmVille game, played by more than 800 million active users. Below is a list of those sample breach notices. The company has developed multiple well-known games including Farmville, Zynga Poker, Words With Friends, Mafia Wars and Empires & Allies amongst others. Presumably because Zynga launched two notable games – FarmVille in 2009 and CityVille in December 2010. Judging from the country list Zynga had at least 133,821,870 users based in Western Europe – this number would consume about 64.88% of users if we compare it against records with duplicates and about 88.99% of users if we compare it against records without duplicates. The Zynga password breach The password breach was first reported in September of 2019, when a Pakistani hacker by the name of “Gnosticplayers” reached out to The Hacker News. The collective database contains plain text credentials leaked from Bitcoin, Pastebin, LinkedIn , MySpace , Netflix, YouPorn, Last.FM , Zoosk, Badoo, RedBox, games like Minecraft and Runescape, and credential lists … Some of the registration dates can be seen below: We can clearly see that Zynga started exploding in 2010 – 2011. Don't reuse your passwords. What data is … While these are to some extent good news, since the most Words with Friends breached accounts don’t use same email-password combinations, 4 million of them seem to have been repetitively using the same password for multiple accounts on different platforms. We can also clearly see that there was a lot of numbers that were based in different states across the United States, so let’s dive into them too: Judging from the analysis above, we can tell that over a quarter – 27.36% – of the entire user base were apparently from Alabama if we compare the number against a database with duplicates. A class-action lawsuit has been filed against gaming company Zynga Inc. over a data breach that exposed the personal information of 173 million users. If you are one of the hundreds of millions of Words with Friends players, make sure you check if your password has been exposed in plain text in the December 15th database. (Source – Consumer Reports) Method of Breach: Hacked. Zynga is an American social game developer. The most common password used is the all-time winner — ‘password’, which has been ‘protecting’ 242,557 Words with Friends users (0.93 percent of the database). Do note that the “Unknown” in the column represents an unusually high amount of users – it’s probably a mix between some countries. Zynga Data Breach: What to Do. Even more concerning is the fact that the usage of simple passwords doesn’t have a declining trend. If you used your Zynga password on another website or app, it is a good practice to change your password on the other website or app. Although this data breach, with duplicates included, impacted over 200 million users, Zynga’s team had done a very good job protecting the data by hashing the passwords with SHA1 and salts. Zynga, counting on the database with duplicates included, had 115,318,761 users with the email length of equal or less than 20 characters and 98,540,978 users with the email length of more than 20 characters. Zynga is in the hot seat. For example, a bank may notify of a credit card number breach that occurred not at the bank, but at a merchant.) Judging by the entire analysis above, we can draw an assumption that monthly active users of Zynga combined (from the beginning until the time of the breach) were nearing a few billion mark which is very impressive given that the service had its peak sometime in between 2011 and 2013. Required fields are marked *.