Cross Fire 2016 Data Breach
Platform · Online gaming and player community services · Free-to-play first-person shooter platform · Global
Cross Fire (mail.ru) Russian Gaming Forum Breach (2016): 7.7M Player Accounts Including Passwords & DOB Exposed
Chinese first-person shooter game community.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
17/100
Lower riskHigher risk
Lower: limited current risk based on data value and recency.
Data Sensitivity i
StandardExposed data is largely lower-sensitivity. Standard identity-protection precautions are advised.
7.7MRecords
2016Year
The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.
Breach Summary
In August 2016, the Russian CrossFire gaming community forum (cfire.mail.ru) was hacked as part of a wave of attacks on mail.ru-hosted vBulletin gaming forums (~27 million accounts total across cfire, parap, and tanks). Attackers exploited SQL-injection flaws in the vBulletin Forumrunner add-on on outdated versions. Exposed data included usernames, email addresses, salted MD5 passwords, IP addresses, and dates of birth (~7.7M unique emails for CrossFire). (Note: this is the Russian mail.ru community forum for CrossFire, not a Chinese platform as previously tagged.)
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
11 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
7.7M records analyzed
About Cross Fire
Cross Fire (cfire.mail.ru) is the Russian community forum for the popular FPS game CrossFire, hosted on the mail.ru platform. It maintained player forum accounts.
Why They Hold Your Data
Online shooter platforms collect player accounts, emails, purchase history, gameplay activity, device data, and community interactions across live-service gaming workflows.
Recent Developments
In August 2016, cfire.mail.ru was breached as part of a wave of attacks on mail.ru-hosted vBulletin gaming forums (also hitting parap.mail.ru and tanks.mail.ru; ~27 million accounts total). Attackers exploited SQL-injection vulnerabilities in the vBulletin "Forumrunner" add-on on outdated installations.
Data Points Exposed
5 verified field types
Date of Birth High
Email Address
IP Address
Password High
Username
Breach Impact
The exposure of usernames, emails, salted MD5 passwords, IP addresses, and dates of birth for ~7.7 million players enables credential-stuffing, account-takeover, identity-verification bypass (via DOB), and targeted phishing.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Credential stuffing and account takeover against reused passwords (salted MD5) | • Identity verification bypass using DOB | • Targeted phishing using exposed emails
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A consumer-service breach: contact and account data supports phishing, account takeover and profile enrichment. For a high-profile principal the main risk is credible impersonation and enrichment of existing exposure.
What You Should Do
- Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
- Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.
How ObscureIQ Can Help
- Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
- Exposure mapping: cross-reference the exposed identifiers against broker-available data to size and prioritize the principal's wider footprint.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
This breach is linked to the mail.ru vBulletin (2016) campaign (2016 related breaches tracked by ObscureIQ). See the full campaign analysis →
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