BioWare hacked; no word from LulzSec
BioWare has sent out a formal statement about the most recent cyber attack targeting their Neverwinter Nights servers.
The hackers had access to user accoutn data such as usernames, passwords, and e-mail addresses.
There’s also a good possibility that if users had their BioWare accounts linked to EA the hackers could have gained access to those as well.
BioWare never asked for social security information, nor was there any credit card or financial information on the servers for the hackers to confiscate.
You can read their formal statement below.
Yesterday (June 14), we learned that a hacker gained unauthorized access to the decade-old BioWare community server system associated with the Neverwinter Nights forums. We immediately took appropriate steps to protect our consumers’ data and launched an ongoing evaluation of the seriousness of the breach. We have determined that no credit card data was compromised, nor did we ever have or store sensitive data like social security numbers. However hackers may have obtained information such as user account names and passwords, email addresses, and birth dates of approximately 18,000 accounts–a very small percentage of total users. We have emailed those whose accounts may have been compromised and either disabled their accounts or reset their EA Account passwords. If you did not receive an email from us, or if your password still works for your EA account, your username and password were not compromised. Nevertheless, changing your password regularly is always helpful to protect your account.
We take the security of your information very seriously and regret any inconvenience this may have caused you. If your username, email address and/or password on the Neverwinter Nights forums are similar to those you use on other sites, we recommend changing your password at those sites as well. We advise all of our fans to always be aware of any suspicious emails or account activity and report any suspicious emails and account activity to Customer Support at 1-866-543-5435.
Whether or not LulzSec was instrumental in this attack has yet to be seen. Typically, the hacker organization will brag about their latest ‘success’ stories on their Twitter and website. If they had a hand in the BioWare server hacking, then they’ve remained uncharacteristically close-lipped about it.
