14 DAY TRIAL // The War Z, the controversial online game made by Hammerpoint Interactive, has been hacked, with nefarious individuals getting access to the databases of the game and of its forum, including personal user information such as email addresses, encrypted passwords, and more. Fortunately, payment details, like credit card numbers, weren't accessed.
The War Z was caught in a huge debate at the end of last year when it was released in a pre-alpha state on the Steam digital distribution service. Due to missing features and shoddy servers, Steam ended up pulling the game from the portfolio and giving customers refunds.
Since then, developer Hammerpoint promised that it's going to make things right and deliver a quality experience.
Sadly, things are going from bad to worse, as the studio has apparently sent out emails to The War Z players saying that its databases had been hacked by nefarious individuals.
The message is displayed when trying to access the forums and mentions that email addresses and encrypted passwords have been stolen.
"We are sorry to report that we have discovered that hackers gained access to our forum and game databases and the player data in those databases. We have launched a thorough investigation covering our entire system to determine the scope of the intrusion. This investigation is ongoing and is our top priority. As part of the remediation and security enhancement process we will be taking the game and forums down temporarily," the studio said.
"The data accessed included email addresses used to log-in to the forum and game, forum passwords which we encrypt, encrypted game passwords as well as in-game character names and the IP addresses from which players log-in to the forum and to the game."
Fortunately, no payment information was exposed, as that data is kept on a third-party server.
"The security of your data is important to us and we want our players to be assured that we take this situation very seriously. We have taken steps to improve security to minimize the chance of this happening in the future and will continue to invest in improving security going forward."
As of yet, it's unclear how or if Hammerpoint will make it up to fans for this attack.