Data breach at Neopets exposes PII of 69 million users

Alina BÎZGĂ

July 21, 2022

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Data breach at Neopets exposes PII of 69 million users

Neopets, the popular website where users own and take care of virtual pets, has suffered a data breach exposing the personal information of 69 million users from around the globe.

News of the breach surfaced Tuesday when a threat actor by the name of “TarTarX” posted an ad for anyone interested in purchasing the Neopets database on a dark web marketplace.

TarTarX is offering the complete database and source code for 4 BTC, or $94,000. He claims that the exfiltrated data includes sensitive personal information such as date of birth, country of residence, IPs, gender, names and emails of approximately 69 million users.

Neopets also confirmed the breach in a tweet earlier today.

“Neopets recently became aware that customer data may have been stolen,” the tweet reads. “We immediately launched an investigation assisted by a leading forensics firm. We are also engaging law enforcement and enhancing the protections for our systems and our user data.”

Neopets advises users to immediately change the password associated with their account, as well as with any other platforms that share the same login credentials.

“It appears that email addresses and passwords used to access Neopets accounts may have been affected,” Neopets added. “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.”

Millions of individuals are affected by data breaches every year. To find out if your information was exposed in a data breach or leak, check out  Bitdefender’s Digital Identity Protection. Our privacy-focused service automatically searches for leaked personal data online (including on the dark web), sending you real-time alerts when any of your private information has been exposed so you can thwart account takeover attacks and limit financial damage.

If you’re worried about fraudsters abusing your identity and financial information, check out our new Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection plans (available for the US only) that offer real-time data breach monitoring and fraud monitoring, among many other perks, to protect against identity theft.

Read more about our identity protection and privacy solutions here.

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Alina BÎZGĂ

Alina is a history buff passionate about cybersecurity and anything sci-fi, advocating Bitdefender technologies and solutions. She spends most of her time between her two feline friends and traveling.

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