Trading Paints Breach & Alternatives

If you are on the iRacing platform, you’ve probably heard about the Trading Paints Breach. Trading Paints is probably the most popular third-party plugin for the iRacing platform and it’s being reported that 270,000 users’ emails and passwords were stolen and sold on the dark web. It was originally discovered by Twitter (I mean X) user, Munsantro.

A message from Trading Paints: https://t.co/yq3EgLXj6C pic.twitter.com/b2sGDbwIHP

— Trading Paints (@tradingpaints) August 28, 2023

Not much is known beyond the statement and some speculation on Reddit and Twitter… I mean X. Users are being advised to change passwords and god forbid we should not be sharing passwords across multiple login accounts, but change those passwords as well.

To add further salt to the wound, the passwords are let’s say, barely encrypted in the Trading Paints database, so it sounds like whoever on the dark web buys the data won’t have a difficult time figuring out what your password is.

How To Protect Yourself

Moral of the story: don’t use the same password on multiple accounts. A breach of databases is becoming all too common. Use a password manager built into Google, iCloud, or one of the many third-party options out there.

Some people are also advising that you uninstall the Trading Paints downloader off your PC until we have confirmation from the company on the extent of the breach. If the hackers put malware into the downloader, they could very easily push that through an update to the application.

What is Trading Paints?

Trading Paints is a platform used for designing car paints, also known as a “livery”. There is also a showroom where creators can show off and share their car paints and allow you to download and race with them. The Trading Paints website allows you to mark a specific paint as what you are racing and then the next time you are on your PC, the Trading Paints downloader application grabs that file and that’s what you see.

The paint downloader and showroom are free to use. Trading Paints has a paint builder that allows you to design your car and place sponsor logos fairly easily for $25 per year. A great value if you are not a graphic designer.

Alternatives To Trading Paints?

Trading Paints is a unique platform in the sense it acts as a paint manager, a painting studio, and a showcase to share paints. There is no 100% alternative

Paint Viewer

When you want to see what paints others are using, iRSidekick Livery is a great alternative. It runs in the background and it has a cool application for viewing the paint. Another special feature includes a tool identifying a driver who may be a little reckless out there. Information on how to download and access their Discord is on their YouTube channel.

Painting

Trading Paints has a very easy-to-use tool for painting your car. While you may not be a graphic artist or want to pay for an Adobe Photoshop license, there are some good free alternatives. Try GIMP for Mac or Paint.NET for Windows. Both are great alternatives to Photoshop. If you are looking for someone to make a paint, you could always check social media or hire a freelancer on Fiverr. The template for your car can be downloaded from the iRacing Paint Shop. This blog post shows you a little more about the template and how to upload it to iRacing.

Summary

As of this blog post, we haven’t seen anything official from Trading Paints beyond the above statement. We’ll be sure to update this post with the latest information. Got a tip for a program or a method we missed? Get in touch with us via our form or social media and let us know!