The War Z Player Data Compromised After Security Breach

Those of you who play Hammerpoint's The War Z may want to change your passwords. Hackers have breached databases in The War Z that held personal player info. Players' email addresses, passwords, in-game names, IP addresses, and game log-in credentials have all been compromised. Hammerpoint has temporarily shut down its servers for The War Z and for its forums to address the issue and find out the scope of the damage.

Hammerpoint assures The War Z players, however, that their payment credentials have not been compromised since it uses a 3rd party to handle all of its transactions. It also says that its players' real names and addresses should not be compromised, unless the players themselves posted the information on the forums. Hammerpoint also says that player passwords and the email addresses that they use to log into the game are encrypted, so hackers should not be view them without using a "brute force" attack. Nonetheless, change your passwords.

Hammerpoint is currently working with external investigators and security experts in order to determine just how wide-spread the breach was. It has enhanced its security systems to better protect its players' personal information. It has notified all of its players of the security breach, and is taking the steps necessary to ensure that an incident like this will not happen again in the future.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with The War Z, it's a zombie survival MMO that many gamers say is a rip off of Arma II's DayZ mod. It has also received bad press for falsely advertising its game. It launched the game on Steam with misinformation. It lied about how the game has a skill tree system and private servers, and it also over-exaggerated its offerings. This outraged many players who purchased the game but realized that they had no access to many of the promised features. The game was removed from Steam, and was reinstated 2 months later after it amended its description.

Hammerpoint didn't release an ETA on when the investigation and security updates will be finished, so we'll update you when we find out. Security breaches seem to be going around a lot recently. Earlier last month, Evernote suffered from a similar breach where user emails and passwords were compromised. It had to initiate a mandatory password reset for all users in order to protect their data.

[via The War Z]