Epic Games Website and Forums Hacked

Commander Fury · June 11, 2011

Following a story that members of Anonymous were arrested by Spanish Police, and the personal details of thousands of people have been stolen after hackers targeted British games developer Codemasters, Gears of War developer Epic Games has become the latest high-profile games industry company to fall victim to a hacking attack, after its website and official forums were recently compromised.

In an email to forum members, Epic Games’ founder Tim Sweeney revealed the extent of the security breach, and reassured users that no unencrypted, sensitive data was stolen. However, since encrypted password strings “may have been obtained”, forum passwords could be decrypted using “brute force” techniques.

Basically, to be completely safe, you should probably change your Epic forums password if you were using it on any other site. For Epic’s part, it has reset all its forum users’ passwords as a precaution.

Here’s the message that was sent out to forum members today –

The hackers may have obtained the email addresses and encrypted passwords of forum users. Plaintext passwords weren’t revealed, but it’s possible that those passwords could be obtained by a brute-force attack on the encrypted passwords. Therefore, we have reset all passwords. Your new password at the bottom of this message.

The Unreal Developer Network (UDN) hasn’t been compromised. Thankfully, none of our web sites ask for, or store, credit card information or other financial data. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and appreciate everyone’s patience as we wrestle our servers back under control.

So, nothing as serious as recent breaches at Sony and Codemasters, but still an embarrassing episode for a triple-A developer and technology provider like Epic.