Notes

Hackers Smuggle Millions Of Minecraft Passwords

Hackers take millions of Minecraft passwords



29 April 2016



Hackers have hacked login information for more than seven million users of the Minecraft site Lifeboat.



Lifeboat members are able to run servers to create custom maps for Minecraft's smartphone edition.



Evidence suggests that stolen data including email addresses and passwords, is being provided by websites that sell hacker files.



The study suggests that passwords were weakly secured, allowing attackers to easily hack them.



Minimise damage



Troy Hunt, an independent security expert, received information regarding the breach. He claimed that he obtained the list from a person who deals in stolen credentials. A number of people had informed him that the information was being circulated on dark net websites.



Mr. Hunt claimed that the data was stolen at the beginning of 2016 but the breach has only just been discovered.



Passwords for Lifeboat accounts were washed however, he added, the algorithm used provided little protection.



Hashing is a method of encryption that encrypts passwords in order to make it difficult to read in the event that the password is lost.
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He said that often it is the case that an Google search for a password that has been hashed would instantly give the correct plain text value. Well-known cracking tools could accelerate and automatize this process, he said.



"A large portion of these passwords could be converted to plain text in a very short amount of time," he said in a blog post about the breach.



This can cause other security issues the expert said, as many people re-use passwords so the discovery of one password can lead attackers to compromise accounts on other sites.



Motherboard was supplied with a written statement from Lifeboat which stated that it had taken measures to minimize the damage.



"When this happened early January we figured the best way to protect our players was to quietly force a password reset without letting the hackers know they had limited time to take action," it told the news site, adding that it now used stronger hashing algorithms.



It stated that it had not received any reports that any person was hurt due to this.



Mr Hunt was vocal about the company's "quietly" forcibly requiring the password reset. He claimed that the policy left him "speechless".



He suggested that Lifeboat should have been more proactive in notifying users to allow them to quickly change passwords if they used on other sites.



"The first thing a business should think about after an incident like this, is "How can we reduce the impact on our customers?" He said.



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