Breach date: 2020-09-21. Added to this index: 2024-09-15. Accounts affected: about 1.4M. Domain: gamesbox.com.
What happened
In September 2020, now defunct website Games Box suffered a data breach that was later redistributed as part of a larger corpus of data. The impacted data included 1.4M email addresses alongside usernames, genders, ages and passwords stored as either a hash or plain text.
Breach data sourced from Have I Been Pwned, used under CC BY 4.0. Additional breach metadata provided by XposedOrNot. DataExposed is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.
What was exposed
Ages: Your age in years at the time the record was created, stored as a number rather than a full birth date. Many sites collect it at signup for age verification or marketing.
Email addresses: The email address you used to register or log in. It is the most common field in breaches because it doubles as your username on most sites.
Genders: The gender or sex recorded on your profile, usually picked from a list at signup, sometimes with a title such as Mr or Ms or a gender identity option beyond male and female.
Passwords: The secret you use to sign in, stored by the breached service either in plain text, in a scrambled form called a hash, or encrypted. How it was stored decides how quickly it can be recovered.
Usernames: The handle or login name you chose for an account, which may be public on forums, games and social platforms or used privately to sign in.
What to do now
Check whether your own address is in this dataset with the free email breach check.
Change the password on this service and every other site where you used the same password.
Turn on two-factor authentication on your email account first, because it is the reset path for everything else.
Treat calls and messages that quote real details about you as hostile until you verify them another way.
Frequently asked questions
What data was leaked in the Games Box breach?
The Games Box breach exposed Ages, Email addresses, Genders, Passwords, Usernames. About 1.4M accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the Games Box breach?
Run the free email breach check with the address you used on that service. It will tell you whether your address appears in this dataset.
What should I do about the Games Box breach?
Change the password on that account and everywhere you reused it, then turn on two-factor authentication. Passwords from this breach are traded and tried automatically against other sites.