Over 16,000 email addresses leaked into the public domain

May 26, 2015 12:06 GMT  ·  By

A member of the TeaMp0isoN hacking crew dumped online a database with information belonging to users of a Minecraft Pocket Edition forum, whose domain has expired at the beginning of the month.

The forum was hosted at minecraftpeforum.net and it was not the official one, although judging from the leaked database, it had built a community since its domain was purchased two years ago.

Hashed passwords, salts and emails dumped online

Among the data dropped into the public domain, there are details regarding the forum member, but more importantly, email addresses and password hashes, including the salt value.

Although the community no longer has a place to gather, members are still affected as their email addresses and passwords are up for grabs for anyone in the game of online scamming.

Even if the password is not cracked, the email addresses are still a treasure trove for cybercriminals, who can target the owners with fraudulent messages pointing to malicious online locations.

Moreover, since crooks already have some information about the victim, they can create a better bait, such a notification purporting to come from the administrators of the Minecraft  Pocket Edition forum.

Forum's SQL database includes more than 16,000 email addresses

Decoding the passwords may not be a job worth the effort, but if carried out, cybercriminals could try the set of credentials on other services, since many users often rely on a single password to access multiple online accounts. This way, attacks would extend beyond phishing and spam.

The leaked database contains more than 16,000 email addresses, many of them not available in public, searchable caches with emails from other data breaches. Some of them are not at their first leak, though.

The hacker claiming the deed goes by the alias RMS and uses the Twitter handle @rmsg0d; there are no details on the date of the breach or how the hacker managed to exfiltrate the SQL database. News about the breach comes from Databreaches.net.