1.5 million gaming profiles leaked after site refuses hacker's $100,000 ransom

A hacker threatened to release user data from an esports community site unless they paid $100,000, but the league behind the site decided it doesn't negotiate with hackers.

It took 12 days after the initial threat on Dec. 27 came in, but the hacker finally leaked more than 1.5 million users' records from the competitive gaming community, ESEA. (ESEA also works to offer reliable servers with extra cheat-prevention security for Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 players for a monthly fee.) According to ESEA, the leak includes the usual suspects from these kind of data leaks—some players' usernames, email addresses, hashed passwords, hashed security question answers, and forum posts—but other, potentially more worrying data like private messages, IP addresses and phone numbers were leaked, too.  Read more...