BioWare hacked ?!?

[dethonlegs]

I got this today. Apparently everyone affected did too:

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 have
taken 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 your user account name and password, email, password,
country and date of birth. As a result, we have disabled your legacy Bioware Account. To
create a new account please visit social.bioware.com.

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 the
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.

If you have questions, please visit our FAQ at
http://support.ea.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5367 or contact Customer Support at the
phone number above.

Aaryn Flynn
Studio GM, BioWare Edmonton
VP, Electronic Arts

[mining]

I got this today. Apparently everyone affected did too:

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 have
taken 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 your user account name and password, email, password,
country and date of birth. As a result, we have disabled your legacy Bioware Account. To
create a new account please visit social.bioware.com.

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 the
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.

If you have questions, please visit our FAQ at
http://support.ea.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5367 or contact Customer Support at the
phone number above.

Aaryn Flynn
Studio GM, BioWare Edmonton
VP, Electronic Arts

Crafty buggers. "No, we didn't close your forums!"

[Daral0085]

Crazy. And I kid you not, just yesterday (before I read this post) I went to the bioware forums to cleanup or change my password because I shared it with a few email accounts. Guess I'll have to go change those ones now.

And if there's any company in the world that doesn't surprise me they got hacked, it's bioware. They are positively trolling for hacks.

Edit: one more point: it is absolutely inexcusable that they would leak passwords. This basically means they weren't encrypting/hashing passwords in their database, which is as basic as security gets. This should be highly embarrassing to them.

[Ajantis.]

The problem is, they've wanted to close that down for awhile, but so many NWN players complained and/or refused to migrate to their social network thing....

They have not invested a penny into that forum for at least three years, and should have done more several years ago, but opted in favor of just letting it exist until they had a good excuse to kill it, and now they have one.

To me, this confirms a mistake they made by spurning the Neverwinter Nights community instead of cultivating it into their gaming library. Devoted and historically faithful consumers are now officially lost to them. They will be hard pressed to get them back now, when they had them (us) in the palm of their hands. Their marketing department sucks I guess... or just overtly focused on finding new clientèle.

[mining]

The problem is, they've wanted to close that down for awhile, but so many NWN players complained and/or refused to migrate to their social network thing....

They have not invested a penny into that forum for at least three years, and should have done more several years ago, but opted in favor of just letting it exist until they had a good excuse to kill it, and now they have one.

To me, this confirms a mistake they made by spurning the Neverwinter Nights community instead of cultivating it into their gaming library. Devoted and historically faithful consumers are now officially lost to them. They will be hard pressed to get them back now, when they had them (us) in the palm of their hands. Their marketing department sucks I guess... or just overtly focused on finding new clientèle.

Didn't they lose their licensing rights for NWN anyway? I think bio did a pretty amazing job of keeping up a patch for so damn long.

[Ajantis.]

Never under estimate the power of good marketing. Everything can be perfect except for that one thing, and a chain of bad events occur.

Conversely, everything can be wrong with a product, and with good marketing, you have a Chia Pet.

[Tsavong]

Who isn't getting hacked these days it must be the new thing.