While the blockbuster International 2016 tournament plays out on the front page of Dota 2’s website, more sinister machinations are grinding away in the background. Overnight, breach notification site Leaked Source revealed that a hacker has allegedly pilfered sensitive information about nearly two million user accounts on the official Dota 2 message board.
“This data set contains 1,923,972 records. Each record contains an email address, IP address, username, user identifier, and one password,” Leaked Source reports. The attack allegedly occurred one month ago, on July 10, via an SQL injection vulnerability in the old vBulletin forum software used by the site, according to ZDNet.
Leaked Source says the passwords were protected with using MD5 hashing and a random “salt,” but the site claims to have cracked the code on over 80 percent of them. You can search for your password in Leaked Source’s database to see if your account was affected. Even if it’s not, be safe and change your Dota 2 forum password, as well as your logins on other sites if you reuse the same password over and over again.
Forum members themselves seem remarkably sublime about the affair. “It was really only a matter of time before someone took advantage of the fact that nobody at Valve even remembers this forum exists,” Bel101 said in a sparsely populated forum thread about the hack.
We've reached out to Valve to confirm the attack's legitimacy and will update this article if representatives respond.
The story behind the story: Tales like this are woefully common. Once again, we’ll take this opportunity to drive home the point that you really, truly should be using unique passwords for every site you log into. Password managers take the hassle out of managing multiple passwords, and go one step further by automatically creating long, randomized passwords. We highly recommend using one.
If you don’t want to trust your passwords to a piece of software, check out PCWorld’s guide to creating better passwords using memorable passphrases. Strong password security is a must-have in today’s world—but it doesn’t have to be a pain in the butt.