1.5M E-Sports Video Game Community Profiles Leaked

More than 1.5 million player profiles from the competitive video gaming community E-Sports Entertainment Association have been leaked, according to reports.

E-Sport Entertainment Association acknowledged a data breach Dec. 27. The site uses bcrypt to secure passwords, but the security advisory lists other possible information that could have been compromised, including the usernames, emails, private messages, IPs and mobile phone numbers.

Data breach notification site LeakedSource Jan. 7 said it received 1.5 million ESEA records that hold more than 90 fields of information per profile including gamers’ identification numbers for the Steam, Xbox and PlayStation Network platforms. A LeakedSource spokesperson told CSO the breach was part of a failed ransom scheme in which the hacker demanded $50,000 to keep quiet.

ESEA security advisory makes no mention of such an attempt, though it advised users to changes passwords and security question answers, review accounts for suspicious activity and be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for personal information.

“Recently, news has been made that ESEA’s user data has been leaked online,” the company tweeted Jan. 8. “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.”