Smogon 2017 Data Breach
Gaming / Video Games
Smogon 2017 Data Breach
A video games service in the gaming sector.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
12/100
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.
386KRecords
2017Year
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 April 2018, the Pokémon website known as Smogon announced they'd suffered a data breach. The breach dated back to September 2017 and affected their XenForo based forum. The exposed data included usernames, email addresses, genders and both bcrypt and MD5 password hashes.
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
10 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
386K records analyzed
About Smogon
Smogon is a video games service in the gaming sector.
Why They Hold Your Data
Smogon is a video games service in the gaming sector. Services like this typically hold activity history, email addresses, gender, location data, passwords, usernames through account registration and normal operations.
Recent Developments
The Smogon dataset circulated publicly; treat as part of the standing exposure landscape.
Data Points Exposed
6 verified field types
Activity History
Email Address
Gender
Geographic location
Password High
Username
Breach Impact
The exposure of credentials alongside personal data heightened account-takeover and reuse risk for Smogon users and drew scrutiny of its data protection.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses | • Doxxing risk from physical address exposure
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).
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