Bioware's Community Server Hacked

[MannyJabrielle]

Received the following email from Bioware:

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

Same info is posted on the bioware social forums as well.

I've yet to poke around, but it seems that the old accounts are 100% locked out, and the old bioware site is completely taken down.

The bad part about this is, as far as I know, to change your password for your NWN game login, you change it through logging into the old bioware site and changing your password there (using the same username as you use to log into NWN games). Since those are gone now (... better not forget your password unless someone knows of another method of handling your nwn password.

Just to be clear, the accounts are *NOT* locked out for the purpose of logging into the game. Your username and password will still function, but as of right now I see no way to change your password if you lost it or simply change your passwords every so often.

[MannyJabrielle]

Another downside with the old site being completely gone... If you had registered your CD keys for NWN and the expansions, you can no longer retrieve them via the website for reinstalling your games.

[The Amethyst Dragon]

[Elhanan]

Updated Info:

We are continuing our investigation of the unauthorized intrusion of the decade-old BioWare server system supporting the Neverwinter Nights forums. As we previously stated, we have determined that no credit card data was compromised from the servers, nor did we ever have or store sensitive data like social security numbers. Our investigation shows that information such as user names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, CD keys and birth dates from accounts on the server system associated with Neverwinter Nights may have been compromised. Accordingly, in an abundance of caution, we are emailing those whose accounts were potentially affected and either disabling their forum accounts or resetting their EA Account passwords.

We take the security of your information very seriously and regret any inconvenience this may have caused our customers and fans. If your username, email address and/or password on your Neverwinter Nights account 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 1-877-357-6007. Aaryn FlynnStudio GM, BioWare EdmontonVP, Electronic Arts

Updated FAQ: http://support.ea.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5367

I am currently locked out of EA and the Bioware Forums. Hopefully I was not caught in a phishing scam of some kind to obtain my passcode, as I replied to a Bioware form letter. Pls be wary!

[Christopher Robin R2]

Another downside with the old site being completely gone... If you had registered your CD keys for NWN and the expansions, you can no longer retrieve them via the website for reinstalling your games.

Which is what happened to me. I had to reinstall Windows, which made NWN (on another drive) think it wasn't installed. So I uninstalled it just tonight. Sadly, I dunno where my manual with my cd-keys are, but no worries, I keep a copy on the website... oops, as I found out tonight, the entire website was yanked. If I'd known that before hand, I could have kept a copy of my nwncdkey.ini file with the keys in it. Damn it.

[Elhanan]

Techless One here....

I believe that CD-Key numbers are available in the nwn.ini files of your own game; uncertain.

[Eric of Atrophy]

Yeppers!

[Christopher Robin R2]

Except I uninstalled my game, so I don 't have that file.

[RustyDios]

I'd expect that Bioware will have a form of backup data, so that you could email them and request your cd-keys (or new ones) .. at the very least they possibly still have the data (it's just no longer accessible on the web)..... ....


.... failing that, erm, call the hackers and ask them for it.. lol....

[The Amethyst Dragon]

From what I've heard, BioWare is working on getting the cd-key/old forum servers back up with more secure hardware/software.

[Christopher Robin R2]

Oh hey, I found my manual. On my self where I looked before, but somehow missed it. *sigh* At least I can play again.

[daveyeisley]

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