Animal Jam Data Breach Passwords __top__ Jun 2026

The severity of storing plain text passwords did not go unnoticed by the legal system. A class action lawsuit was filed against WildWorks in the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming (Case 2:21-cv-00090).

The 2020 Animal Jam data breach remains one of the most significant cybersecurity incidents affecting a children's virtual world. Compromising millions of accounts, the incident highlighted the critical vulnerabilities in online platforms targeted at younger audiences.

The leaked database contained a wide range of information, spanning accounts created over the previous 10 years. The full breakdown is as follows: Animal Jam Data Breach Passwords

Look out for these red flags:

The initial breach occurred in when an unauthorized user accessed a private Slack channel used by WildWorks for internal communication. This channel contained a private Amazon Web Services (AWS) key . With this key, the hackers were able to bypass security measures and access the game's main user database. The company was alerted to the theft on November 11, 2020 , when security researchers saw a sample of the stolen data posted on the hacker forum RaidForums. The severity of storing plain text passwords did

An analysis of the exposed passwords reveals some concerning trends:

I'll follow the search plan as outlined. I'll start with Round One to gather initial information. search results have provided a good amount of information. I have several official and news sources. I should open some of the top results to gather more detailed information. I'll open result 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 from the first search, and also some from the second search. search results have provided a wealth of information. I have official statements, news articles, and details about the breach. I'll also need to cover the type of passwords exposed, the encryption method, and the risks. I should also include information about what users can do to protect themselves. I'll continue with Round Two to gather more specific details. have gathered a substantial amount of information. Now I need to structure the article. I'll include sections on the breach overview, what happened, what data was exposed, how it happened, the aftermath, risks, and what users should do. I'll cite sources appropriately. Now I'll start writing the article.Headline: Animal Jam Data Breach: What Happened, Was Your Password Exposed, and How to Stay Safe** This channel contained a private Amazon Web Services

The steps to secure your account and personal information are straightforward. If you or your child was playing Animal Jam around 2020, it's highly likely the account was affected.

: The database was discovered on a cyber-criminal forum, raidforums.com . Data Compromised

[Current Date] Reading Time: 4 minutes

The breach occurred in when a hacker managed to penetrate a database used by WildWorks , the developer behind Animal Jam. According to the official data breach alert from WildWorks, the attacker gained access through a third-party vendor's communication tool. The scale of the breach was massive: 46 million user accounts were compromised. 7 million unique email addresses were exposed.

I've done a quick batch file to download 1080p youtube videos from windows command line. It is based on youtube-dl, but since youtube now uses its DASH format for 1080p, you have to download video and audio separately, then recombine them.

You need :
youtube-dl.exe from https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html
ffmpeg.exe from http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/
Please adapt the path to these static executables in the script.

Usage : to download "Handmade Hero Day 050 - Basic Minkowski-based Collision Detection", type
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youtube-dl-dash.bat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g8DLrNyVsQ


Now the script :
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@REM Usage: youtube-dl-dash.bat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxxxx
@REM Get the URL from the command line
SET YOUTUBE_URL=%1

@REM Set tools
SET YOUTUBEDL_EXE=D:\NoInstall\youtube-dl.exe
SET FFMPEG_EXE=D:\NoInstall\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe

@REM Set DASH best quality for video and audio
SET VIDEO_Q=137
SET AUDIO_Q=141

@REM Get video and audio filename
"%YOUTUBEDL_EXE%" --get-filename -f %VIDEO_Q% "%YOUTUBE_URL%" > youtube-dl-dash-temp.txt
SET /p VIDEO_FILENAME=<youtube-dl-dash-temp.txt
"%YOUTUBEDL_EXE%" --get-filename -f %AUDIO_Q% "%YOUTUBE_URL%" > youtube-dl-dash-temp.txt
SET /p AUDIO_FILENAME=<youtube-dl-dash-temp.txt
del youtube-dl-dash-temp.txt

@REM Download video and audio files
"%YOUTUBEDL_EXE%" -f %VIDEO_Q% "%YOUTUBE_URL%"
"%YOUTUBEDL_EXE%" -f %AUDIO_Q% "%YOUTUBE_URL%"

@REM Recombine video and audio
SET FILEOUT=NEW-%VIDEO_FILENAME%
"%FFMPEG_EXE%" -i "%VIDEO_FILENAME%" -i "%AUDIO_FILENAME%" -acodec copy -vcodec copy -threads 0 "%FILEOUT%"

@REM Clean up
del "%VIDEO_FILENAME%"
del "%AUDIO_FILENAME%"
ren "%FILEOUT%" "%VIDEO_FILENAME%"

Edited by Joël Thieffry on Reason: OK, I'll copy-paste it
You really don't need manually combine audio and video files. youtube-dl will do that automatically if you have ffmpeg executable avaialble in PATH (or current folder). So simply running:
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youtube-dl -f 137+141 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g8DLrNyVsQ
will create one mp4 file with video and audio in it.
Just tested, it works very well. Excellent!

Thank you for the tip.
Cheers, for both of these tips, chaps. So the youtube line in my own dlhmh (zsh, although I think it's all bash-compatible) script now reads:

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youtube-dl -i -r 800K -f 137+141 --download-archive "${VIDDIR}/.dlarchive" -o "${VIDDIR}/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" --dateafter "$(date +%Y%m%d -d'4 days ago')" "https://www.youtube.com/user/handmadeheroarchive"


The script also downloads the latest source .zip and has a commented line ready for the assets.

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wget -O "${SRCDIR}/handmade_hero_source.zip" "${HMHDIR}/${HMHSRC}"
#wget -O "${SRCDIR}/handmade_hero_assets.zip" "${HMHDIR}/${HMHASSETS}"

Edited by Matt Mascarenhas on Reason: Bug in the wget assets line
I have made a Windows only download script at the start of the series.

You can find the instructions at:

http://www.reddit.com/r/HandmadeH...hzo/handmadehero_download_script/

Currently it only supports downloading the source code. I will be adding assets downloading support later.

Edited by Matej Kac on

The severity of storing plain text passwords did not go unnoticed by the legal system. A class action lawsuit was filed against WildWorks in the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming (Case 2:21-cv-00090).

The 2020 Animal Jam data breach remains one of the most significant cybersecurity incidents affecting a children's virtual world. Compromising millions of accounts, the incident highlighted the critical vulnerabilities in online platforms targeted at younger audiences.

The leaked database contained a wide range of information, spanning accounts created over the previous 10 years. The full breakdown is as follows:

Look out for these red flags:

The initial breach occurred in when an unauthorized user accessed a private Slack channel used by WildWorks for internal communication. This channel contained a private Amazon Web Services (AWS) key . With this key, the hackers were able to bypass security measures and access the game's main user database. The company was alerted to the theft on November 11, 2020 , when security researchers saw a sample of the stolen data posted on the hacker forum RaidForums.

An analysis of the exposed passwords reveals some concerning trends:

I'll follow the search plan as outlined. I'll start with Round One to gather initial information. search results have provided a good amount of information. I have several official and news sources. I should open some of the top results to gather more detailed information. I'll open result 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 from the first search, and also some from the second search. search results have provided a wealth of information. I have official statements, news articles, and details about the breach. I'll also need to cover the type of passwords exposed, the encryption method, and the risks. I should also include information about what users can do to protect themselves. I'll continue with Round Two to gather more specific details. have gathered a substantial amount of information. Now I need to structure the article. I'll include sections on the breach overview, what happened, what data was exposed, how it happened, the aftermath, risks, and what users should do. I'll cite sources appropriately. Now I'll start writing the article.Headline: Animal Jam Data Breach: What Happened, Was Your Password Exposed, and How to Stay Safe**

The steps to secure your account and personal information are straightforward. If you or your child was playing Animal Jam around 2020, it's highly likely the account was affected.

: The database was discovered on a cyber-criminal forum, raidforums.com . Data Compromised

[Current Date] Reading Time: 4 minutes

The breach occurred in when a hacker managed to penetrate a database used by WildWorks , the developer behind Animal Jam. According to the official data breach alert from WildWorks, the attacker gained access through a third-party vendor's communication tool. The scale of the breach was massive: 46 million user accounts were compromised. 7 million unique email addresses were exposed.


Edited by Matej Kac on Reason: Added link to youtube-dl documentation
I am interesting in how youtube-dl extract the URL of a YouTube video.
I looked at the source code but it is complicated python code
but I think it is more likely inside this magic function _extract_signature_function

if anyone knows python better and can tell me how it is extracting the URL, it would be appreciated.
Or simply if I can use the tool to just extract the URL because I want to use a faster downloader and I just want to give it the link.
When I'm using youtube-dl it downloads video with my maximum Internet speed. I don't see how using other downloader would help.

But if you want to use youtube-dl to get URL of actual video file the "--get-url" argument will do that. Look at "youtube-dl --help" for more stuff - like getting title or other info.

If you want to extract URL manually, you can do that from big block of JavaScript code under <div id="player-api"> element.
Thanks. It is very useful.
I love Open Source command line tools.
Do you know why Youtube-dl can't download playlists? It is supposed to.
It downloads for me just fine.
Try "--print-traffic --verbose" arguments to see various debugging information, maybe it will contain some helpful information why it fails for you.
Yeah, it is weird. I am downloading a series (Youtube playlist)of Japanese stories and converting it to .mp3. It works with that list but not for Handmade Hero's Debug Infrastructure playlist. I'll check the verbose debug output from youtube-dl.

[Edit] I am now downloading all the Debug Infrastructure playlist as audio files, it is working properly, I guess it has some issues with the video. [/Edit]

Edited by Carlos Gabriel Hasbun Comandari on
chizran
If anybody is interested, I have added the ability to download assets from sendowl and pre stream Q&A from Twitch to my LINQPad daily download script. As before, it can also download the current source code zip file from sendowl and the latest video uploaded to the YouTube archive.

Requirements:

LINQPad installed.

To be able to download the source code and the assets, you obviously need to preorder the game and supply your sendowl URL per the instructions (below).

For YouTube video download, you need to have both ffmpeg and youtube-dl in your PATH. youtube-dl is required for both Twitch and YouTube, ffmpeg is required only for YouTube.

Instructions:
  • •Download, install and run LINQPad.
  • •In LINQPad go to File>Open, paste link to the script and click Open.
  • •If you want to download videos you have install both ffmpeg and youtube-dl. Easiest way to get them is via chocolatey.
  • •Set your parameters and click Execute (F5)
  • •When you run the script for the first time, it will ask you for the sendowl URL. You can also set it manually via LINQPads builtin password manager (File>Password Manager) and adding password with the name 'handmadehero.sendowlurl' and value of your full sendowl URL. Passwords are securedly stored with the Windows Data Protection API (check the LINQPad FAQ)



@chizran a quick question - I just found this post - I see that you have pre stream as an option here, I wonder how you download and differentiate it exclusively from the rest of the stream - is it that for (prestream == yes) you get it from Twitch and if no then Youtube? Would you mind shedding some light on it and More importantly, do you have all the previous pre streams and can you make them available somehow? (Read - https://hero.handmadedev.org/foru...on/969-pre-stream-technical-noise)
In his script he downloads prestream video from twitch by specifying to download 2nd, not the 1st most recent video. Youtube-dl can download specified videos in the playlist. You simply pass whole handmade hero archive as a playlist url and item index 1 to youtube-dl, and it will save pre stream video.
As mmozeiko explained, downloading the prestream videos works by specifying the video from the Twitch playlist. Unfortunately, since a few episodes ago, this hasn't been working as expected. YouTube-dl downloads only one video file per broadcast from Twitch. I do have all the files archived, but the latest files are quite large, since these are whole episodes. My upload speed is not the best, but can I least try to get some of them online during the holidays.