Codemasters Hacked

We've received reports from several readers about a note they received from Codemasters about a hacking incident, which has Codemasters.com offline until further notice. In many cases they have reason to believe personal details have been compromised, but not payment information. The entirety of the message follows.
Important information regarding your account

Dear valued Codemasters customer,

On Friday 3rd June, unauthorised entry was gained to our Codemasters.com website. As soon as the intrusion was detected, we immediately took codemasters.com and associated web services offline in order to prevent any further intrusion.

During the days since the attack we have conducted a thorough investigation in order to ascertain the extent and scope of the breach and have regrettably discovered that the intruder was able to gain access to the following:

Codemasters.com website

Access to the Codemasters corporate website and sub-domains.

DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page

Access to the DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page.

The Codemasters EStore

We believe the following have been compromised: Customer names and addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted passwords and order history. Please note that no personal payment information was stored with Codemasters as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.

Codemasters CodeM database

Members' names, usernames, screen names, email addresses, date of birth, encrypted passwords, newsletter preferences, any biographies entered by users, details of last site activity, IP addresses and Xbox Live Gamertags are all believed to have been compromised.

Whilst we do not have confirmation that any of this data was actually downloaded onto an external device, we have to assume that, as access was gained, all of these details were compromised and/or stolen.

The Codemasters.com website will remain offline for the foreseeable future with all Codemasters.com traffic re-directed to the Codemasters Facebook page instead. A new website will launch later in the year.

Advice

For your security, in the first instance we advise you to change any passwords you have associated with other Codemasters accounts. If you use the same login information for other sites, you should change that information too. Furthermore, be extra cautious of potential scams, via email, phone, or post that ask you for personal or sensitive information. Please note that Codemasters will never ask you for any payment data such as credit card numbers or bank account details, nor will Codemasters ask you for passwords or other personal identifying data. Be aware too of fraudulent emails that may outwardly appear to be from Codemasters with links inviting you to visit websites. The safest way to visit your favourite websites is always by typing in the address manually into the address bar of your browser.

Unfortunately, Codemasters is the latest victim in on-going targeted attacks against numerous game companies. We assure you that we are doing everything within our legal means to track down the perpetrators and take action to the full extent of the law.

We apologise for this incident and regret any inconvenience caused.

We are contacting all customers who may have been affected directly.

Should you have any concerns or wish to speak to a member of our Customer Services team, please email them at custservice@codemasters.com.

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25.
 
Re: Codemasters Hacked
Jun 10, 2011, 19:06
Dev
25.
Re: Codemasters Hacked Jun 10, 2011, 19:06
Jun 10, 2011, 19:06
Dev
 
AnointedSword wrote on Jun 10, 2011, 18:08:
Try and use your brains people...Businesses want to keep their clients info private, after all, that is how they make their money...
Yeah they do... as long as it doesn't cost them much money. Businesses are in business to make a profit, which they think doesn't include spending tons on top notch security. Unfortunately, since the internet is global and hackers can hack into anything anywhere from anywhere, the only way to prevent most of these attacks is actually HAVE top notch security. Most smaller websites go under the radar and don't get attacked so their mediocre security doesn't get tested.

The first positions to go when a business wants to let someone go, are those who aren't seen as contributing directly to a companies bottom line (and of course it never includes management). These include positions like copy editors at news organizations (anyone else notice how sloppy they've gotten in spelling and grammar lately?), or the security guy at IT (he's just a money sink with no return right? Right?), or the environmental guy (he's just costing us money, surely we won't get fined if we ignore this stuff), etc.

Its why many corporations don't have proper backup procedures in place either, its something that's viewed as not needed until something bad happens.

Think about this if nothing else... many of these corporations storing credit card info are violating Visa/mastercard/amex policies regarding this. There's a bunch of requirements that if followed as they are dictated by credit card companies, should prevent any credit card numbers from ever getting stolen in a usable state by hackers. Guess what? Many of them are NOT following those procedures. And those procedures are logical and straightforward to protect data. Such as NOT STORING THEM IN PLAINTEXT. You can't possibly convince me that a company made a good faith effort to keep client info private if they stored things like passwords as PLAINTEXT such as happened just recently and reported and linked here on bluesnews.

Edit: Yeah, here it is
http://www.bluesnews.com/s/122334/evening-safety-dance
Sony was hacked AGAIN just 1 week ago and over a million accounts with PLAIN TEXT passwords were taken.

This comment was edited on Jun 10, 2011, 19:22.
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