Battlefield Heroes Back Online After LulzSec Hacker Attack

Electronic Arts got its Battlefield Heroes free-to-play online shooter functional once more, after having been the victim of the last batch of attacks from hacker group LulzSec.

Battlefield Heroes led the way for EA's free-to-play initiative, with the cartoon-ish shooter winning over quite a lot of gamers.

Sadly, the game was targeted by hacker group Lulz Security (aka LulzSec) in its farewell gift, before retiring last weekend from the hacking scene.

The group released a big package of data that included, among sensitive information from the NATO online bookshop or other large companies, 550,000 encrypted user names and passwords from the beta stage of Battlefield Heroes.

As you can imagine, Electronic Arts quickly shut down the online game in order to investigate just what damage was done by LulzSec, and inform its users.

Now, the company got Battlefield Heroes back online, and released a formal statement on the website of the free-to-play game, which revealed that the hacker attack only managed to get data from an early beta of the game, and even that was encrypted, so players shouldn't worry just yet.

"Service has been restored on Battlefield Heroes following a short hiatus related to a security breach," EA stated. "Our investigation is ongoing, however it appears screen names and encrypted passwords associated with an early beta version of Heroes have been compromised."

"To the best of our knowledge, it appears that no personal data was compromised - no emails, account history, credit card numbers or payment methods. Any further updates will be posted on this page. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Thankfully, LulzSec has now retired from the hacking scene, after striking quite a lot of gaming targets, including Bethesda as well as online games like Minecraft or EVE Online.

It's also good to hear that EA kept its data bases encrypted in order to prevent hackers from doing any real damage with the data they managed to steal.