Data Breach

ESEA data breach, 1.5 million gamers’ records leaked

The E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA), one of the largest competitive video gaming communities was hacked, 1.5 million players have been affected.

Bad news for gamers, the E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA), one of the largest competitive video gaming communities was hacked in December. The data breach exposed the profiles of more than 1.5 million players.

The incident was also confirmed on Saturday by the breach notification service LeakedSource that reported 1,503,707 ESEA records were compromised.

The records include username, first and last name, password bcrypt hash, email address, registration date, city, state (or province), last login, date of birth, zip code, phone number, website URL, Steam ID, Xbox ID, and PSN ID.

As you can see the profiles are very detailed, the use of the bcrypt hash protect users’ passwords, anyway gamers are exposed to a wide range of malicious activities such as social engineering attacks and spear phishing attacks.

ESEA shared the link to the following “Outage and Security Update” via Twitter.

“Recently news has been made that ESEA’s user data has been leaked online. We expected something like this could happen but have not confirmed this is ESEA’s data. We notified the community on December 30th, 2016 about the possibility this could happen. The type of data and storage standards was disclosed. We have been working around the clock to further fortify security and will bring our website online shortly when that next round is complete. This possible user data leak is not connected to the current service outage.”

 

The company was informed of the data breach on December 27 and issued a security warning on December 30, 2016. At the time I was writing, ESEA only confirmed the data leak, but still hasn’t admitted that profiles were accessed from its systems.

The news of the ESEA data breach is circulating on the Internet, many players confirmed it on Reddit.

Salted HASH, quoting a LeakedSource spokesperson, reported that the ESEA data breach was part of a ransom scheme. Crooks demanded $50,000 in payment to avoid disclosing the hack.

In response to the incident, the company reset passwords, multi-factor authentication tokens, and security questions.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – ESEA data breach, hacking)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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