Words with Friends just suffered a major data breach

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The latest high-profile company to suffer a data breach is the social game developer, Zynga. Some 218 million players of popular game Words with Friends are affected by this breach, which includes most data held on them,

If you’ve been playing on the iOS or Android versions of the game, and signed up before September 2 of this year, it’s a safe bet that you are in the affected group.

If you play Words with Friends, you might have had your details stolen

It seems that gnosticplayers, the Pakistani-based hacker who was selling records from other services earlier this year, decided that Zynga was too tempting to leave alone.

The information they swiped from Zynga includes: players’ names, email addresses, login IDs, Zynga account IDs, hashed passwords, password reset tokens (if requested), phone numbers (if attached to the account), and Facebook IDs if you connected via Facebook login. Yikes.

If you’re part of the breach, here’s what to do:

• Go change your Zynga password, asap. Don’t reuse another password from another service, and sign up for a password manager if you don’t already use one
• Change any other accounts using that same password, and change them to unique passwords that are at least 12 characters in length

At this stage of the investigation, it’s not clear if this was a password stuffing attack or if the hacker got in some other way. Zynga has reset login details of any affected passwords, and is in the process of notifying players.

Surprised by the news regarding Words with Friends and Zynga? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.