Neverwinter Nights Forums Hacked

Continuing the ongoing streak of hacked gaming websites and forums, the security of the “decade-old BioWare community server system associated with the Neverwinter Nights forums” has been hacked, information from approximately 18,000 taken, Aaryn Flynn lets us know. All compromised users should have received an email from BioWare on the situation.

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.

There is a short Q&A on the breach here.

Q: What exactly was breached?

A: Account names, email addresses, passwords, country and birth dates may have been exposed. No credit card data was exposed and we have never collected Social Security numbers. If you linked your legacy Bioware account with an EA Account, then additional information that you associated with your EA Account (if any) may have been accessible as well. Such information could include your name, mailing address, billing address, language, game entitlements and games played, and other game-specific account information depending on your use of your EA Account.

In general it sounds like a relatively small breach but as mr Flynn said, it’s always a good idea to change your password regularly, so here’s a good reason to.