Exclusive — Hacker Steals Over 218 Million Zynga ‘Words with Friends’ Gamers Data

Sep 29, 2019

A Pakistani hacker who previously made headlines earlier this
year for selling almost a billion user
records stolen from nearly 45 popular online services has now
claimed to have hacked the popular mobile social game company
Zynga Inc.

With a current market capitalization of over $5 billion, Zynga
is one of the world’s most successful social game developers with a
collection of hit online games—including FarmVille, Words With
Friends, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, and Café World—with over a
billion players worldwide.

Going by the online alias Gnosticplayers, the serial hacker told
The Hacker News that this time, he managed to breach “Words With
Friends,” a popular Zynga-developed word puzzle game, and
unauthorisedly access a massive database of more than 218 million
users.

According to the hacker, the data breach affected all Android and
iOS game players who installed and signed up for the ‘Words With
Friends’ game on and before 2nd September this year.

In a statement published over a week ago, Zynga admitted the data
breach ^[2], revealing that the
“account login information for certain players of Draw
Something and Words With Friends that may have been
accessed,” though the company did not reveal the number of affected
users.

“We recently discovered that certain player account information may
have been illegally accessed by outside hackers.” reads the
statement.

Based on a sample data Gnosticplayers shared with The Hacker News,
the stolen users’ information includes their:

Names
Email addresses
Login IDs
Hashed passwords, SHA1 with salt
Password reset token (if ever requested)
Phone numbers (if provided)
Facebook ID (if connected)
Zynga account ID

Besides this, the hacker also claims to have hacked data belonging
to some other Zynga-developed games, including Draw Something and
the discontinued OMGPOP game, which allegedly exposed clear
text passwords for more than 7 million users.

“An investigation was immediately commenced, leading third-party
forensics firms were retained to assist, and we have contacted law
enforcement,” the company said.

“As a precaution, we have taken steps to protect these users’
accounts from invalid logins. We plan to notify players as the
investigation proceeds further.”

What’s your take? If you are a user of the Words With Friends game,
you should immediately change the password for your account and
also on other services in the event you re-used the same password.

The Hacker News has already reached out to Zynga for a comment
and will update this story if we hear back.

In March 2019, the same hacker compromised over 26 million
online accounts ^[3]
originating from 6 websites and put the stolen records for sale on
the popular dark-web market called Dream Market.

In February, the hacker made three rounds of stolen accounts up
for sale on Dream Market, posting details of 620 million online
accounts ^[4] stolen from 16 websites
in the first round, 127 million from 8 sites in the second, and
92 million from 8
websites ^[5] in the third.

^[1]

References

^{^}
billion user records stolen
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
admitted the data breach
(investor.zynga.com)
^{^}
over 26 million online accounts
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
620 million online accounts
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
92 million from 8 websites
(thehackernews.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Exclusive — Hacker Steals Over 218 Million Zynga ‘Words with Friends’ Gamers Data

References

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