14 DAY TRIAL // The hacker attack that The War Z underwent, the controversial zombie online shooter, was concentrated on its forums as publisher OP Productions has confirmed that the nefarious individuals didn't access the game's account database.
The War Z was at the center of a huge controversy late last year when it was released onto Steam as an early alpha without many of the features listed by the service.
Since then, the game was taken down from Steam and developer Hammerpoint has worked hard to improve the experience.
Sadly, things got worse at the beginning of the month when publisher OP announced that the game had been hacked by nefarious individuals who managed to access personal user information like names, email addresses, IPs, or encrypted passwords.
Now, the studio has apparently completed its investigation into the matter and confirmed that "the attack was concentrated on the forums. We did not find definitive evidence that our game account database was accessed."
The hackers were able to access the forum database and steal personal user information, however.
"The forums database contained unencrypted email addresses used to log-in to the forum, forum passwords which were encrypted, as well as IP addresses from which players log into the forum. The database did not contain player names (unless identified in their email address) and did not contain payment information, which we do not receive or retain. Forum passwords were encrypted, but our investigation indicated that many participants use weak passwords that could be guessed using brute force," the publisher wrote on its forums.
Hackers were also able to steal some administrator accounts inside the game and ban some players, but things have since been straightened out.
"The hackers were also able to access certain "dev" level game accounts and play the game using those accounts. They were able to ban up to several dozens of players randomly. We disabled the hacked accounts, identified the wrongly banned players and reversed those bans within hours of the attack."
OP once again apologized for the attack and revealed that it had taken lots of new measures to increase the security of the forums and game.