Zynga's Words With Friends: Hacker Allegedly Steals Data of 218 Million Players

The breach involved 218 million 'Words With Friends' players across the globe.

By Harpreet Singh | Updated: 1 October 2019 18:55 IST

Zynga's Words With Friends: Hacker Allegedly Steals Data of 218 Million Players

The same hacker was previously associated with some major data breaches

Highlights

Personal information of 218 players was allegedly stolen
The same hacker was earlier connected to other data thefts
Zynga has previously acknowledged the security breach

If you play the popular online game called Words With Friends, you should probably change your password right now. A prolific hacker who goes by the name of 'gnosticplayers' claims to have stolen personal information of 218 million users of the app. The app is built by Zynga, a company famous for a bunch of popular interactive games including FarmVille, Draw Something, and OMGPOP. The hacker claims anyone who downloaded Word with Friends on both Android and iOS before September 2 is affected by the data breach.

Earlier last month, Zynga had revealed that some personal information of its users may have been accessed by 'outside hackers'. However, the company did not reveal the exact extent of the damage or the number of players involved.

The Hacker News claims that the hacker confirmed to the publication about the data breach. Previously, the same hacker has been connected with two massive data dumps involving 747 million stolen accounts across 24 major websites and mobile apps.

The stolen personal information from Zynga's Words With Friends app includes user's names, login IDs, email, passwords, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, and user IDs on Zynga. The breach seems to have affected players on both Android and iOS platforms.

Zynga boasts of over 1 billion users across all its popular online games such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, and more. The company currently has a market capitalization of over $5 billion.

It's still unclear how the hacker managed to gain access to the app's data. The hacker 'gnosticplayers' was earlier linked to massive data breaches labelled as 'the collections' earlier in 2019 which involved personal data of more than a billion users across popular online services.

Those of you who have a Zynga account and use it to play any of the company's games, it's recommended that you change your login password as soon as possible.

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Further reading: Zynga, Words With Friends

Harpreet Singh

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Harpreet is the community manager at Gadgets 360. He loves all things tech, and can be found hunting for good deals when he is not shopping online. He has written about deals and e-commerce in India for many years, as well as covering social media and breaking technology news. More