If you're an avid Minecraft player and you clicked on any recent links sent through an e-mail about changing your username and password or “logging into” Mojang, you may be in a bit of a pickle. It turns out that a group of phishers have phished a bunch of e-mail and password combinations from Minecraft gamers.
PC GamesN is reporting that more than 1,800 Minecraft users have had their account data accessed and published online, after unsuspectingly giving it out through a phishing website.
You see, the phishers make up fake e-mails posing as Mojang; they send the e-mails out to a number of people in hopes that said people are Minecraft players. Someone who actually plays Minecraft just has to click on the link in the fake Mojang e-mail and it will take them to a fake site where it requests your e-mail and password. It's really that easy for the phishers to take hold of the data.
Mojang responded to the incident with a post on their own website, explaining that the issue wasn't on their end and neither Mojang's website nor Minecraft's database have been hacked.
As noted on the Mojang website...
“We haven’t been hacked. A bunch of bad people have tricked some of our users into disclosing their account information. We’ve emailed everyone affected, and reset all compromised passwords. If you haven’t received an email from us, you don’t need to worry.”
As they state, and as PC GamesN suggests, it's best to reset and change your e-mail and password information as soon as possible.
Phishing is a common occurrence with just about any popular game online. A lot of times the phishers will send out fake e-mails for various popular games such as Diablo III, World of Warcraft or Runescape. I can't even count how many times I've received a spam message about changing my World of Warcraft and Runescape information even though I don't even play those games.
So the main takeaway from all of this is don't click on phishing links. I imagine a lot of the people who did fall for the trap may have done so because they're young. A lot of kids make up for the Minecraft community and it's easy to see how they may have clicked on an e-mail that leads to a phishing site. This just means that parents need to be more in tuned to what their kids are doing online. Of course, if it happened to be parents clicking on the phishing links... well, now you know not to click on those links.
Minecraft is one of the biggest selling games in the world and is available for home consoles, PC and mobile devices. You can pick up a digital or physical copy from online or via local retailers (for the PlayStation and Xbox versions).
Microsoft recently purchased Mojang, the Minecraft developers, for $2 billion. So far there's no telling exactly what will come out of the deal, but maybe it'll mean slightly better ways to prevent phishers from easily getting a hold of user data? I guess we'll find out some time in the future.
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