Mojang has advised Minecraft players to change their passwords and make it a stronger one for security reasons following the leak of more than 1,800 Minecraft users' e-mails and passwords.
Responding to the hacking rumours, Mojang said in its official website, "No! 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."
It further clarified that no one was able to get access to "Mojang mainframe". The company, while asking players not to panic, revealed that it stores the passwords in "a super encrypted format".
Microsoft, which had acquired the Minecraft franchise some time back, also came out with a similar statement. "We can confirm that no Mojang.net service was compromised and that normal industry procedures for dealing with situations like this were put in place to reset passwords for the small number of affected accounts," said a Microsoft spokesperson, CNET reported.
News of the leak was reported earlier this week by Heise, a German news website. The leak contained e-mail addresses and their passwords from Minecraft users. Post this, many wondered if Mojang.net was compromised by hackers. However, investigation that followed the incident have revealed that it was the result of phishing attacks or malware.
"The bad people got their hands on other people's passwords by using an evil technique called 'phishing.' That basically means they pretend to be Mojang and fool people into entering their private details onto fake websites," said a Mojang post.
Mojang further advised players to use different password for each of their internet logins. When users have an identical password for all their accounts, hackers can easily break into all of them if they reciver the password of just one.
Minecraft is a phenomenon in the gaming industry, with more than 16,645,000 people having bought the game, Daily Mail reports.
Title Update 20 Released
Last Week, Mojang released the full patch notes for Title Update 20 that consists of new additions and makes some changes to Minecraft. The update fixes bugs and many other issues in PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
Below are the full patch notes of Title Update 20 for Minecraft (Minecraft Forum):
- Fix for various Redstone issues.
- Fixed a crash when breaking an Item Frame containing a map.
- Fixed a crash when a Dispenser is dispensing water or lava when the Dispenser is blocked.
- Fix for placing a boat on harmful surfaces causing the game to crash.
- Updates to horse and other animal de-spawning to take into account Saddles, Saddle bags, Leads, Armor and Nametags.
- Fix for Stonebrick stairs recipe.
- Fix for issue where player is able to stay alive with zero hearts in their Healthbar.
- Fixed an issue in the Host Options menu in Adventure mode causing options to be set wrongly.
- Fix for issue where animals don't stop running after being hit.
- Fix for issue where destroying planted Pumpkin and Melon Seeds drops an incorrect number of seeds.
- Librarian villagers now have a small probability of offering nametags for sale.
- Add a rare probability of spawning Skeletons/Wither Skeletons in the nether.
- Brought forward change so that Witches naturally spawn, rarely, anywhere that's dark.
- Fix for issue where Wither Skeletons stop spawning in the Nether when the difficulty is set to Easy from Peaceful.
- Changed Minecart riding behaviour back so that the player turns with the Minecart.
- If mob griefing is turned off, sheep shouldn't change grass blocks when they eat them.
- Fix for TNT cart exploding despite 'TNT Explodes' option being turned off.
- Fix to Noteblock fall-off distance so they can be heard further away.
- Fix for player legs not being rotated correctly when riding.
- Fix for Wolf heal tooltip.
- Fixed improper tooltip displayed when Player is holding a Lead and aiming at an aggressive mob.
- Fix for Potion of Weakness effect description having incorrect values.
- Fix for issue where Creepers hover off the floor.
- Fixed issue where Name Tags do not appear to work correctly on the Wither, Iron Golem and Wither Skeleton.
- Fix for player nametags not being colored.
- City Texture Pack - Daylight sensor changed to look more like a solar panel.
- Fix for issue where a horse wasn't rendering while riding it.
- Fixed Save Transfer issue.
