1.1M Emuparadise Accounts Exposed in Data Breach

McAfee

Jun 11, 2019

2 MIN READ

If you’re an avid gamer or know someone who is, you might be familiar with the retro gaming site Emuparadise. This website boasts a large community, a vast collection of gaming music, game-related videos, game guides, magazines, comics, video game translations, and more. Unfortunately, news just broke that Emuparadise recently suffered a data breach in April 2018, exposing the data of about 1.1 million of their forum members.

The operators of the hacked-database search engine, DeHashed, shared this compromised data with the data breach reference site Have I Been Pwned. According to the site’s owner Troy Hunt, the breach impacted 1,131,229 accounts and involved stolen email addresses, IP addresses, usernames, and passwords stored as salted MD5 hashes. Password salting is a process of securing passwords by inputting unique, random data to users’ passwords. However, the MD5 algorithm is no longer considered sufficient for protecting passwords, creating cause for cybersecurity concern.

Emuparadise forced a credential reset after the breach occurred in April 2018. It’s important that users of Emuparadise games take steps to help protect their private information. If you know someone who’s an avid gamer, pass along the following tips to help safeguard their security:

Change up your password. If you have an Emuparadise account, you should change up your account password and email password immediately. Make sure the next one you create is strong and unique so it’s more difficult for cybercriminals to crack. Include numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters, and symbols. The more complex your password is, the better!
Keep an eye out for sketchy emails and messages. Cybercriminals can leverage stolen information for phishing emails and social engineering scams. If you see something sketchy or from an unknown source in your email inbox, be sure to avoid clicking on any links provided.
Check to see if you’ve been affected. If you or someone you know has made an Emuparadise account, use this tool to check if you could have been potentially affected.

And, of course, to stay updated on all of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow me and @McAfee_Home on Twitter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.