Over 170 million usernames and passwords have been comfirmed to have been stolen from social mobile games giant Zynga back in September 2019.
As reported by The Guardian, the US developer has seen 172,869,660 unique accounts hacked by the breach. While the cyber-attack was confirmed at the time, this is the first information to be revealed about the number of accounts affected, with Zynga stating that the breach was one of the "unfortunate realities of doing business today".
Monitoring website Have I Been Pwned sourced the amount of player information and ranked the issue as one of its largest breaches, placing the event at 10th position. It also positioned the loss of data at second for household names, following MySpace's 360 million lost accounts in 2008.
Those holding Zynga accounts can check the data breach site to see if their data was one of 17 million-plus included.
Unfortunate realities
"A company like Zynga has far-reaching access into hundreds of millions of consumers and their devices, based on the games they develop and communities they create," said LogRhythm Labs chief security officer and VP James Carder, a security research and intelligence threat company.
"Therefore, to initially respond that the hack is 'one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today' comes across like an attempt to deflect responsibility when Zynga does in fact have a responsibility to protect its users and their data."
According to the firm, no financial details were accessed. Zynga declined to comment further regarding the number of accounts affected.
The Words with Friends developer recently announced that it will open a new studio in Birmingham, UK. The studio will be part of the NaturalMotion division and focus on racing games.
