EA restores Battlefield Heroes after hack

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 27 June, 2011

Reckons credit card numbers are safe.

EA has restored service to free-to-play first-person shooter Battlefield Heroes after it was forced offline by retired hacker group LulzSec.

The Battlefield Heroes website is now up and running, allowing gamers to get their game on.

In a statement given to Eurogamer, EA confirmed screen names and encrypted passwords "associated with an early beta version" of the game have been compromised.

Over the weekend, LulzSec announced it has disbanded – but not without releasing the user names and passwords of over 750,000 accounts gathered from several gaming forums and the Battlefield Heroes beta.

As far as EA knows, however, no emails, account history, credit card numbers or payment methods were taken.

The statement in full:

"Service has been restored on Battlefield Heroes following a short hiatus related to a security breach.

"Our investigation is ongoing, however it appears screen names and encrypted passwords associated with an early beta version of Heroes have been compromised.

"To the best of our knowledge, it appears that no personal data was compromised – no emails, account history, credit card numbers or payment methods. Any further updates will be posted on this page. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (3) Latest comment 8 months ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • niroe #1 8 months ago

    MD5 is not encryption EA ... Its a hash thats easy to recover passwords from!

  • fletch273 #2 8 months ago

    At least this will generate attention for such a good game.

  • VibratingDonkey #3 8 months ago

    @niroe
    Indeed. A lot of MD5 hashes have been cataloged. I tried like 10 random ones from the BF Heroes list and 7 of them were in this one database. And I know very little about this kind of stuff, meaning it is incredibly easy for people to get their hands on a lot of passwords when this type of encryption is used.

    Also in addition to salting their hashes EA should start allowing special characters. I don't know why they're artificially restricting their users' passwords.

    Also, the BFHeroes site is still down from where I'm sitting.
    Edited by 2 at 27/06/11 @ 21:21