BioWare Neverwinter Nights server hacked
"Highly sophisticated, unlawful cyber attack."
RPG giant BioWare was "the target of a highly sophisticated and unlawful cyber attack" and has been hacked.
The accounts of 18,000 people associated with the Neverwinter Nights forum were "affected", the developer explained - "a very small percentage of total users".
Account names, email addresses, passwords, country and birth dates "may have been exposed". No credit card details were "exposed" and "we have never collected social security numbers", assured BioWare in its hack FAQ.
No other BioWare servers are known to have been affected.
"Yesterday (June 14), we learned that a hacker gained unauthorised access to the decade-old BioWare community server system associated with the Neverwinter Nights forums," wrote BioWare Edmonton GM Aaryn Flynn. "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."
There's a chance that if you linked your legacy BioWare account with an EA account then the latter may be accessible to a hacker as well. Data stored there includes mailing and billing address, language, game entitlements and games played.
Why did the hacker target an old, devout PC modding and gaming community surrounding Dungeons & Dragons game Neverwinter Nights? Perhaps it was running on old hardware. Was it LulzSec, the hacker group that's taken out numerous targets including EVE Online and Minecraft? The lack of Twitter-based bragging by the group suggests not.
Neverwinter Nights was released on PC in 2002. Eurogamer's review awarded 7/10.
"If you're a role-playing fan and don't mind downloading additional content, Neverwinter Nights is something of a no-brainer," wrote Eurogamer's Gestalt. "It might not be the best role-playing game ever (not by a long shot), but it is arguably the most promising."
