Hackers steal Stanford students’ Poptropica passwords

Humor by Richard Coca
April 11, 2021, 10:14 p.m.

In the latest cyberattack, hackers have obtained stolen data belonging to members of the Stanford community — most notably, their Poptropica passwords. The stolen passwords are part of a massive data breach meant to profit off exclusive items on the online role-playing game platform.

An undergraduate emailed The Occasionally a screenshot of the security notification following the breach.

“Not going to lie, I was scared shitless when I saw that my Bank of America password was compromised. But then I saw that my Poptropica password was, too … Needless to say, I haven’t slept since,” said Julia Sanchez ’21.

Sanchez, who has not logged into Poptropica since 2012, noted that at this time she has decided to not pay the $75,000 ransom as she already pays a ransom of this amount to Stanford.

Similarly, Amir Salib ’23 told The Occasionally that while Poptropica was their life all throughout high school, they have since moved onto League of Legends.

“If they wanted the real big bucks, that’s where they should have hit,” Salib said.

Upon further investigation — and learning that the dark web is apparently not even that hard to get into — The Occasionally found several Poptropica accounts being sold on the deep net. Those having completed difficult islands such as Skullduggery were sold at a markup.

Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.

Contact the Humor section at humor ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

Richard Coca '22 has previously served as editor of The Grind for volume 258, managing editor of Satire in vol. 257, and CLIP Co-chair in vol. 255. He is majoring in Human Biology and minoring in Anthropology. Contact him at rcoca 'at' stanforddaily.com.

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