The Neopets Database Means Someone Could Be Accessing Your Accounts

Neopets (neopets.com) is a US-based virtual pet website that was extremely popular with younger internet users throughout the 2000s and early 2010s. In 2013, the Neopets database was compromised, exposing 22,858,431 user accounts. The stolen data includes email addresses, usernames, IP addresses, and passwords stored in plain text. The breach was first publicly disclosed in May 2016 when the data appeared in underground trading communities. This breach is verified and represents one of the larger plaintext password exposures in online gaming history.

Why Neopets Breach Is Dangerous

Storing 22.8 million passwords in plain text means there was no barrier between the stolen database and working credentials. The moment the Neopets database was extracted, every email-password pair was immediatly available for use in credential stuffing attacks. The scale of 22.8 million accounts means this dataset has been incorporated into numerous aggregated breach compilations and is actively tested against other platforms. The breach occured years before users were notified, meaning many had no opportunity to change their passwords before the data was already in circulation.

What Was Exposed in the Neopets Leak

• Email Address
• Username
• IP Address
• Password (plain text)

Why This Neopets Data Puts You at Risk

Many Neopets users created accounts as children or teenagers and used simple, memorable passwords they continued to use across other platforms as they grew older. A password created in 2013 for a virtual pet game may still be active on an email provider, a banking platform, or an employer's system years later. The Neopets breach is serous because its demographic skews toward users who likely had minimal password hygiene at the time of registration and may not have updated their credentials since the breach was disclosed in 2016.

Why a Gaming Site Used by Younger Audiences Creates Long-Term Credential Risk

Online gaming platforms popular with younger users present a specific long-tail risk. Users who registered as minors often had no understanding of password security and selected credentials that were easy to guess or commonly reused. Those same passwords, now exposed in plain text from the 2013 Neopets breach, are being tested against email accounts, social media platforms, and other services those former users now hold as adults. The IP addresses in the dataset also provide historical geographic data that can be used to build targeting profiles for specific regions.

Check If Your Data Was Exposed

HEROIC's free breach search checks your email against 400 billion+ compromised records, including the Neopets dataset. Search now to confirm whether your account was part of this breach. If you registered on Neopets before 2013 and have not changed the password you used there, update any account where that password is still active.