The Glu Breach Contains Exactly 311,834 Exposed User Records

HEROIC analysts identified a database leak tied to Glu (glu.com), a gaming site with an associated user forum. The breach is dated February 1, 2016, and exposed 311,834 records, including email addresses, usernames, IP addresses, password hashes, and the salt values used to strengthen those hashes. The forum ran on vBulletin software at the time. No public breach notice was issued, though the site owners reset passwords for affected users afterward.

Why the Glu Breach Is Dangerous at This Scale

With more than 311,000 records exposed, this is a large enough dataset to make it valuable for automated attacks. Beyond emails and passwords, the leak includes IP addresses, which can help attackers narrow down a user's general location, and salt values, which are meant to strengthen password hashes but don't make them uncrackable, especially for weaker or reused passwords.

What Was Exposed in the Glu Database

• Email addresses
• Usernames
• Password hashes (vBulletin format)
• Salt values
• IP addresses

Why This Matters for Glu Forum Members

Even though Glu reset passwords for affected accounts after the breach, that only protects the Glu account itself. If any of the 311,834 people affected used the same email and password combination somewhere else, and never updated it on other sites, that credential is still sitting in this dataset ready to be tried through credential stuffing. A username, email, and password together also give attackers enough to attempt targeted phishing.

How a vBulletin Database Breach Like This Happens

This incident is recorded as a database breach involving vBulletin, one of the most widely used forum platforms on the internet. Forums on vBulletin have historically been compromised through unpatched software vulnerabilities or outdated plugins, letting attackers pull the entire user table, including hashed and salted passwords, directly out of the database in one action. Once extracted, those hashes can be run through cracking tools to recover the original passwords over time.

Check If You Are Affected

If you ever had an account on Glu's forum or a similar gaming community, it's worth confirming whether your information was part of this leak. HEROIC's free breach scanner checks your email against more than 400 billion leaked records, so you can see your exposure and update any passwords you're still using elsewhere.