Earth 2 data breach: 420K accounts exposed
Severity: medium · Patch status: no-fix-needed · Since 2024-11-07
In October 2024, 421k unique email addresses from the virtual earth game Earth 2 were derived from embedded Gravatar images. Appearing alongside player usernames, the root cause was related to how Gravatar presents links to avatars as MD5 hashes within consuming services, a feature Earth 2 advised has now been disabled on their platform. This incident did not expose any further personal information, passwords or financial data. Exposed data: email addresses, usernames. The breach dates from Oct 16, 2024; Have I Been Pwned loaded it on Nov 7, 2024.
What to do
- If you had a Earth 2 account, change its password and the password of any other account that reused it.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
- Check whether your addresses are in this breach at https://haveibeenpwned.com.
Sources
All live incidents on Threat Watch