The Gameshot Leak Contains Exactly 290,201 Email and Password Pairs

HEROIC analysts identified a dataset tied to Gameshot, a South Korean gaming portal based in Seoul that provided news, reviews, and community features, circulating on an underground forum. The breach is dated November 21, 2017, and contains 290,201 records, each pairing a user's email address with their plaintext password. The exposure affected users in South Korea and is classified as both a database exposure and a combolist.

Why the Gameshot Leak Is Dangerous

All 290,201 of these passwords were stored and leaked in plaintext, meaning no encryption ever protected them. Anyone who obtains this dataset can read each password exactly as it was typed, with no cracking or decoding needed. At this scale, the leak gives attackers a substantial pool of ready-to-use logins in a single file, all captured from one platform at once.

What Was Exposed in the Gameshot Breach

• Email addresses
• Plaintext passwords

Why This Matters

A gaming portal password might seem low stakes, but most people reuse the same password across multiple accounts, meaning a Gameshot login can just as easily unlock an email inbox, a banking app, or a shopping account. With nearly 300,000 credential pairs in one file, attackers have a large-scale target list ready for credential stuffing, a technique where the same email and password combination is tested against dozens of other popular services in bulk. Whichever accounts still use the same password become vulnerable to takeover, fraud, and identity theft.

How a Database and Combolist Breach at Scale Happens

This breach is tagged as both a database exposure and a combolist, meaning Gameshot's stored user records were compromised directly, likely through a vulnerability in the platform's systems, and then converted into a straightforward list of email and password pairs for wide distribution. Combolists of this size are especially valuable to attackers because they can be run through automated tools that test hundreds of thousands of credentials against other sites in a short amount of time, with no decryption needed.

Check If You Were Affected by the Gameshot Leak

If you ever created a Gameshot account or reuse the same password across different sites, it is worth checking whether your information was part of this breach. HEROIC's free breach scanner checks your email address against a database of more than 400 billion leaked records, including this one, so you can find out in seconds whether a password change is overdue.