Official EA Forum Hacked and Defaced, Data Is Secure

Unnamed hackers managed to breach the security measure implemented by EA on its official forum (forum.ea.com) after successfully exploiting a vulnerability they identified in the software that runs the site (possibly a Java app).

Voice Of Grey Hat informs that the company’s Marketing Manager Dan Sheridan came forward with a statement to reassure users that the security hole was patched up and their personal information wasn’t exposed at any time.

“As some of you noticed, the homepage of the forums was defaced by a hacker yesterday using a very new exploit for the software which runs the forums. This was noticed quickly and we took the action to take the forums offline while we investigated the details. This work is now complete, and the vulnerability we believe was used has now been fixed,” Sheridan said.

“There is no evidence that any personal data was compromised, and as passwords aren’t stored in a recoverable manor, we are confident they remain secure. Thank you for your patience whilst the forums were offline and we took the necessary steps to investigate this.”

Fortunately, the situation isn’t as critical as the one that occurred last week when a group of hackers uncovered a vulnerability in the Punkbuster program, used to prevent players from cheating.

Utilizing the flaw, the attackers began banning Battlefield 3 players for no apparent reason.

Almost a week later, EA was still working on removing the faulty bans stating that the root of the problem was not directly related to Battlefield 3, instead it had something to do with third-party services.

It seems that EA is highly targeted by hackers lately, but hopefully they will take this as a warning sign and make sure that in the future all their assets and customers will be protected properly.