critical severity September 01, 2019 · 3 min read

Zynga — 173 Million Words With Friends Accounts (2019)

If you are a customer of Zynga, here’s what’s now in circulation.

The maker of Words With Friends lost 173 million accounts with salted SHA-1 passwords and, unusually for a casual-gaming breach, phone numbers. Words With Friends skews older and skews family, which changes who is exposed.

A word-game tile rack over a leaked account record

What happened

In September 2019 the game developer Zynga — best known for Words With Friends and FarmVille — suffered a breach exposing 172,869,660 unique email addresses alongside usernames, phone numbers and passwords stored as salted SHA-1 hashes. The data was provided to Have I Been Pwned by dehashed.com. Reporting at the time carried a considerably larger claim from the seller; the 173 million figure is the count of unique addresses actually verified in the data.

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Salted SHA-1 is better than MySpace and still not good

Zynga salted its hashes, which is the difference between this breach and the MySpace one. A salt means every account gets a unique hash even when two people chose the same password, so an attacker cannot crack the whole set at once. That genuinely helps.

What a salt does not fix is speed. SHA-1 is designed to be fast, which is a virtue in a checksum and a liability in a password hash — modern hardware tries enormous numbers of candidates per second against a single salted hash. The result is predictable: weak and moderate passwords fall, strong ones mostly hold. If your Zynga password was a common word with a number after it, treat it as recovered. If it was long and random, it probably survived.

This is why blanket advice fails. The same sentence — "passwords were exposed" — describes MySpace, where nothing survived, and Wattpad, where essentially everything did.

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What the free scan actually returns

Sample resultyou@email.comIllustrative — not a real person

Found on people-search siteswe remove these

These listings are live, public, and legal to remove — and removing them is what we do.

value redacted in this sampleage, relatives, address historySpokeo

value redacted in this samplephone, household, property recordsBeenVerified

value redacted in this sample580 companies checked

Found in breach recordsverifiedreported — unverified

Each record is labeled: confirmed breach data, or an attacker’s claim no one has verified.

verifiedvalue redacted in this samplepassword + phone · 2024telecom breach

unverifiedvalue redacted in this sampleclaimed in ransomware listing · 2026leak-site claim

Leaked data cannot be deleted from the internet — anyone claiming otherwise is lying. Broker listings can be removed. We do the second, and show you exactly what to fix from the first.

Report details & sourcing

Severity Critical contact details only, none of them permanent

Disclosed September 01, 2019

Last reviewed July 22, 2026

Affected 172.9M email addresses

Data exposed Email addressesUsernamesPasswordsPhone numbers

By GalaxyWarden Threat Research · Editorial & sourcing standards

Editorial & sourcing policy

GalaxyWarden is a breach-monitoring service and news aggregator. We do not exfiltrate, host, purchase, or redistribute stolen data. Breach information is compiled from publicly accessible sources and threat-intelligence platforms, and is reported as claims attributed to their source. We promptly correct or remove material shown to be inaccurate — see our content & takedown policy or write to support@galaxywarden.com.

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