Neopets was recently attacked by a major data breach, affecting 69 million accounts of its players. When the company heard of the news, a spokesperson initially confirmed the breach to the community via the Discord server, stating that they are aware of the issue and are actively trying to resolve it.
On Twitter, Neopets stated that they had found out that the personal information of their customers may have been stolen. Immediately, they began looking into the matter with the assistance of a forensics company. In addition to this, the company confirmed that they are working with law enforcement to improve the security of both their systems and the data of their users.
Neopets Hacking
The Neopets hack was discovered by the community forum Jellyneo, which reported that the hacker was able to access the full database and source code of the website when they found the breach.
Jellyneo believes that the passwords, email addresses, IP addresses, genders, countries, and birthdays may have been exposed given the wide scope of the incident.
According to Polygon, the hacker posted the stolen data on a data breach site for four bitcoins, or around $100,000, where a buyer may modify data, credits, or in-game pets.
The company did not disclose the scope of the Neopets hack or whether or not payment card data was also compromised. Users were also urged to modify their login passwords by Neopets personnel.
The company tweeted, "We strongly recommend that you change your Neopets password."
Neopets added, "If you use the same password on other websites, we recommend that you also change those passwords."
It appears that email addresses and passwords used to access Neopets accounts may have been affected. We strongly recommend that you change your Neopets password. If you use the same password on other websites, we recommend that you also change those passwords. (2/3)
— Neopets (@Neopets) July 21, 2022
Neopets: The Virtual Pet Game
As reported by Kotaku, the long-running virtual pet website Neopets allows users to customize their pets, play games, take part in a digital economy, and interact with other users.
Neopets does provide a paid subscription for its players. The paid subscription unlocks the premium features, it gives more costumes, access to better game features, and disables advertisements.
Additionally, players can buy NeoCash to use on numerous Neopets items available in the NC Mall.
Previous Mishaps on Neopets
In 2014, JumpStart Games purchased the Neopets website, and JumpStart was then bought out by NetDragon in the year 2017.
During the course of the past year, Neopets has been in conflict with the community on multiple occasions, including the current one. Polygon also reported that in 2016, Neopets also suffered a major breach, with tens of millions of accounts getting hacked.
The 2016 hack became messy, the information was widely disseminated, and it is quite likely that it was utilized to hack into other services using passwords that were reused.
Additionally, the data was also used by players of Neopets to steal from each other, whether it was Neopoints, the game's virtual currency, or ultra-rare pets themselves.
Neopets has had quite a bumpy ride with its community. After Adobe's support for Flash was discontinued in 2020, a large number of Neopets' features became unavailable, causing the site to become permanently crippled.
The website has been upgraded to HTML-5, which has resulted in significantly improved performance.
In March of 2021, Neopets suffered another big security breach when cybercriminals took unique pets and sold them on the black market.
Users were also irate in September 2021 after JumpStart revealed the Neopets Metaverse Collection of NFTs; the company received a lot of criticism as a result.
The website has maintained its ability to draw in members of various subcultures. Despite the fact that the site has faced some challenging hurdles, Neopets still maintains a player population that is both active and committed.
