BioWare has joined the illustrious club of the recently violated after a hacker gained access to a decade-old community server system associated with their Neverwinter Nights forum on June 14th.
According to a post from BioWare’s Edmonton Studio GM Aaryn Flynn, hackers breached the server and may have gained access to the account details of around 18,000 users that include user account names and passwords, email addresses and birth dates. But if you linked your legacy BioWare account with an EA account, additional information may also have been compromised that includes: your name, mailing address, billing address, language, game entitlements and games played, and other game-specific account information. Luckily, the BioWare investigation has determined that no credit card information was lost in the breach. As a security precaution, BioWare is suggesting that players change their passwords.
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 .Aaryn Flynn
Studio GM, BioWare Edmonton
VP, Electronic Arts
BioWare is the latest target in a long string of hacker attacks that have either compromised user details or interrupted services. Earlier this year Sony, Codemasters, Bethesda, Epic Games and Frogster all suffered security breaches that have compromised the personal account details of countless users.
Sources:
BioWare Forums
Neverwinter Nights Brach FAQ
