Words With Friends player data allegedly stolen for 218 million users

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
September 30, 2019
Updated June 18, 2025
2 min

A Pakistani hacker claims to have hacked Zynga’s Words With Friends popular social mobile game, gaining access to a database of information on more than 218 million users.

The Hacker News reported that a hacker who goes by the online alias Gnosticplayers said he breached the game and got the player data, just as the hacker allegedly also gained access to a billion user records stolen from 45 online services earlier this year.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.