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A January 2016 breach exposed data associated with about 7.1 million Lifeboat accounts, including email addresses, usernames and password hashes. Lifeboat was an independent Minecraft Pocket Edition multiplayer community; this was not a breach of every Minecraft account.
What happened in the Lifeboat breach?
Contemporary reporting said attackers obtained Lifeboat’s user database in early January 2016. Mozilla Monitor records the breach date as January 1, 2016. The affected service was Lifeboat, a separate community serving Minecraft Pocket Edition players—not Minecraft accounts generally.
The exposed information included email addresses, usernames and passwords stored as unsalted MD5 hashes, according to reporting by Bitdefender. A hash is not the same as a password stored in readable text, but unsalted MD5 is a weak way to protect passwords: attackers can test likely passwords against the hashes and may recover the original passwords, particularly when those passwords are common or reused.
How many accounts were affected, and what information was exposed?
Have I Been Pwned lists 7,089,395 affected accounts in its breach index; the listing was added in April 2016. Mozilla Monitor identifies the exposed data types as email addresses, usernames and passwords. The figure describes Lifeboat accounts, not the total number of Minecraft users or accounts.
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Why was Lifeboat’s response criticized?
Reports said Lifeboat responded by forcing password resets over a period of several weeks, without notifying users when the breach occurred. A Lifeboat representative was quoted by Bitdefender as saying, “We did this over a period of some weeks.”
The concern was that resetting credentials on Lifeboat alone would not protect people who had reused the same password on other services. Troy Hunt argued that users needed to know about the exposure so they could change reused credentials elsewhere, writing, “Breach concealment is not a security strategy.”
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What should you do if you had a Lifeboat account?
- Change any reused password. If the password you used on Lifeboat was also used for email, social media, shopping, financial or other accounts, change it on every service where it appeared. Start with your email account, since access to email can help someone reset other passwords.
- Give every account its own strong password. A unique password prevents exposure on one service from directly unlocking another account that shares the same credential.
- Use a password manager. Mozilla Monitor recommends using one to generate and store distinct passwords, making reuse less likely.
- Check the associated email address with a breach-notification service. Mozilla Monitor recommends checking for exposure. A result can help identify known breaches tied to the address, but it does not prove that every account is safe or that a particular password was or was not recovered.
Was your Minecraft password exposed?
The breach concerns Lifeboat credentials. If you used a different password for your Microsoft or Minecraft account, the Lifeboat breach alone does not establish that it was exposed. If you reused your Lifeboat password for Minecraft or any other service, change it there and anywhere else it was reused.
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