14 DAY TRIAL // Riot Games, the publisher of League of Legends, one of the most popular online multiplayer games, has revealed that hackers have gained access to the account information of some players from North America.
“The security of your information is critically important to us, so we’re really sorry to share that a portion of our North American account information was recently compromised,” the company wrote in a blog post.
The compromised information consists of names, usernames, email addresses, and salted password hashes.
While the passwords are encrypted, the company warns that they can be cracked, especially in the case of players who have weak passwords.
“Additionally, we are investigating that approximately 120,000 transaction records from 2011 that contained hashed and salted credit card numbers have been accessed. The payment system involved with these records hasn't been used since July of 2011, and this type of payment card information hasn't been collected in any Riot systems since then,” Riot Games representatives stated.
Impacted users are being notified. In addition, players with accounts in North America are required to change their passwords in order to prevent account theft.
In order to prevent such incidents, Riot Games is preparing to roll out a couple of new security features: two-factor authentication, and an email verification system that will require all new registrations and account changes to be associated with a valid email address.
Over the past period, a number of game makers have experienced data breaches. In early July, Ubisoft admitted that its uPlay database was hacked.
A few days later, Nintendo announced that its Club Nintendo service was breached via brute force attacks.
Brute force attacks were also used in July to compromise the Konami ID accounts of Konami customers.