The gamers at Electronic Arts are finding purchases they didn’t make on their accounts. This news comes in right after the Lizard Squad hackers attacked and brought to a stop the PSN and Xbox live services while the H4lt squad leaked the Xbox One SDK online, allowing the development of Homebrew Apps to be run on the gaming console.
The gaming community at Electronic Arts have yet to hear from any hackers claiming the transactions. Some experts say that these could have been brought about by previous breaches of the service while investigators say the hackers may have stolen credentials from other sites and networks where the users had shared their sensitive information.
Some underground websites actually sell stolen credentials of gamers and this happened recently in November. A few months ago, Kotaku found out that the Firemonkeys forum board was compromised and 40,000 user credentials. The same source that spoke to Kotaku also spread the story on Reddit in an effort to uphold the movement for transparency and disclosure from the #GamerGate.
The whistleblower’s statement read: “During my tenure at a large publisher, our community forum was hacked, and the information of over 40,000 members (including names, and email addresses) was downloaded and stolen. The publisher suppressed this information. When my contract had expired I approached a writer about this, and he declined to publish the story because he was close friends with people who work at this publisher and the publisher’s local office.” Experts believed that the hackers took advantage of a known flaw in the Vbulletin CMS.
At the same time, several gamers have been reporting that their origin accounts were hacked and many people spoke of strange and unauthorized activities occurring on their gaming networks. The strange activities include getting receipts in German and Russian on their Origin accounts.
Venture Beat was the first one to report suspicious activities to the Electronic Arts.
“We found no indication at this point of a breach of our Origin account database. Privacy and security of user account information are of the utmost importance to us. We encourage our players to use Origin user ID and passwords that are unique to their account and to report any activity they feel may be unauthorized to EA customer support at help.ea.com.”
The most that the Origin users can do is reset their passwords and enable a two-password authentication to protect their accounts.