This is a depressing year to be on the internet. And a doubly-depressing one to be a newswriter on the internet. The latest (but, let’s not bloody kid ourselves, not last) game company to suffer the peculiar ire/amusement of hackers is Bioware. Fortunately, only a very specific bit of Bioware, so don’t panic too much: their 10-year-old Neverwinter Nights forum. It actually happened a little earlier this month, but now Bioware are alerting everyone affected and opening up about exactly what details were compromised. You may have thought, following the initial talk of this hack, that it was no big deal for you, but if you used to play NwN you might well have left passwords, email addresses, phone numbers or CD keys in the information these imps have made off with. Credit card details are apparently safe, however. Full Bioware statement below.



“We recently learned that hackers gained unauthorized access to the decade-old BioWare server system supporting the Neverwinter Nights forums. We immediately took appropriate steps to protect our consumers’ data and launched a thorough ongoing evaluation of the breach. We have determined that no credit card data was compromised from the servers, nor did we ever have or store sensitive data like social security numbers. Our investigation shows that information such as user names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, CD keys and birth dates from accounts on the system may have been compromised, as well as other information (if any) that you may have associated with this forum account. In an abundance of caution, we have disabled your legacy Account. To create a new account please visit social.bioware.com. We take the security of your information very seriously and regret any inconvenience this may have caused you. If your username, email address and/or password on your Neverwinter Nights account are similar to those you use on other sites, we recommend changing the password at those sites as well. We advise all of our fans to always be aware of any suspicious emails or account activity and report any suspicious emails and account activity to Customer Support.”

There are a few more details and suggestions in this official FAQ about the hack.

Right, I’m off to fucking go fucking change all my fucking passwords afuckinggain. Fuck!