If you're a fan of Unreal Tournament by Epic Games or have ever participated in discussions on online forums run by Epic Games, you may need to change your forum password as soon as possible.
It appears that Unreal Engine and its creators, Epic Games, have recently been put at risk by an unknown hacker group, which have stolen over 800,000 forum accounts, with over half a million being from the Unreal Engine forum.
The hackers managed to get their hands on the forum accounts by exploiting a known vulnerability that “resided” in an old version of the forum software vBulletin, which allowed them to gain access to the full database.
Epic believes the registration information that includes user names, passwords, email addresses, birth dates, IP addresses, and the login date may have been stolen during the attack.
Specifically on the Unreal Engine website they announced:
“We believe a recent Unreal Engine and Unreal Tournament forum compromise revealed email addresses and other data entered into the forums, but no passwords in any form, neither salted, hashed, nor plaintext.”
However, ZDNet reports:
“Their full history of posts and comments including private messages, and other user activity data from both sets of forums have also been compromised.”
Most of the stolen passwords are encrypted and cannot be cracked easily, but hackers could exploit other stolen data to send phishing messages to forum members' email addresses in an attempt to infect their systems with ransomware or other malicious software.
