Gamers have become victims again. The gaming company Epic Games, Inc. (Epic) announced a breach of more than 800,000 registered users from Unreal Engine and the Unreal Tournament forum. Information stolen includes user names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, birth dates, Facebook access tokens, comments, and activity history. The breach occurred on August 11 when a hacker bypassed security using a flaw in the vBulletin software that the forum uses.
Recently, hackers did the same thing to a Clash of Kings forum and stole information from 1.6 million accounts and in 2015, the same happened to Electronic Arts (EA) Origin accounts. Both were running the same outdated vBulletin software.
These incidents emphasize the importance of updating software when patches are released. When there are known exploits, hackers will try to take advantage of any systems they find that have not been updated. That is the case with all of these.
This doesn’t only apply to companies running servers, but to anyone who connects to the Internet. Patches are released relatively often; as you may notice from the little indicators on your computer status bars or apps. It is especially important to apply security and critical patches right away.
In addition, when you use any app or software, don’t use your same login credentials for another site such as Facebook or Google. If one of those gets breached, whomever has those credentials also has access to any other accounts for which you use those credentials and vice versa. Take a few extra minutes and create a new account with a completely unique password to avoid any attempts by hacker to reuse the passwords on other sites. This is a real risk and is often blamed for data breaches.
Remember to create strong passwords that include a combination of upper and lower case letters, at least one number, at least one special character, and that each password is at least eight characters.
Epic does not believe that passwords need to be changed because the passwords acquired by the hackers were encrypted and password information is stored separately. However, it’s always worth your time to play it safer and change them anyway. It’s also a good idea to change your Facebook password while you’re at it, if you used it to sign into your Epic account.
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