14 DAY TRIAL // The Nexus Mods is the most used website for game modding right now, with millions of users, and it looks like their database has been breached.
It's not uncommon for big websites and services to get hacked and it happens all the time. A few years ago this was actually much more frequent, and users found out that many big companies were keeping the passwords in plain text or that they used old packages and didn't upgrade servers and services to get protection against vulnerabilities.
That's not the case anymore, but it only means that hackers need to be better at what they do. Websites still get hacked, even if the they live in the cloud, and emails and user names still get leaked. Now, it looks like Nexus Mods has this problem as well, although there is some comfort in the fact that the passwords are not kept in plain text.
It's not clear whether there was a breach or not
The problem with such intrusions is that they don't leave too much of a trace. The site administrators for Nexus Mods didn't even know that they might have had a breach until people started to talk about this on Reddit.
Following the lead from there, the Nexus Mods admins have followed up on the trail, and they found a number of suspicious things, but nothing of real consequence that would clearly indicate that something was wrong.
This is probably the worst possible scenario because they also don't know what to fix to make sure that whoever might have gained access can't do it again. The best solution for users is not only to change their passwords with something they don't use on other services, but to also choose a long and complex password, with numbers, letters, and symbols.
Nexus Mods was contacted by a security firm and they gave them some indications that they have been breached, but nothing too specific.
Also, the website has a special Premium Members category, but their financial details were not affected because nothing is stored and everything is handled by PayPal.
We'll provide more information when it becomes available. For the time being, changing the password is the only solution for the millions of users for Nexus Mods, and we can only hope that they managed to track the problem faster.
Nexus Mods is a huge resource of mods
The Nexus Mods cover a large array of mods for numerous titles, but the website became really famous after it became the go-to source for Skyrim mods, long before Steam implemented the Workshop. The website also has its own application that helps users track the mods, install them, and keep them up to date.
It's used by millions of gamers, more than 10 million, in fact, so it's easy to see why this might be more important than you can imagine.