The details of users who registered accounts on the forums dedicated to Bohemia Interactive’s DayZ video game have been stolen by hackers, the developer warned on Thursday.
DayZ is an open world survival video game that is currently in early access Alpha. First released in December 2013, the game had already reached 3 million sales by January 2015.
Bohemia Interactive first warned users about the DayZ forum breach on January 23, and on Thursday the company confirmed that the attackers had gained access to user details.
The developer said the hackers accessed and downloaded usernames, email addresses and password hashes. It’s unclear what type of hashing algorithm has been used, but Bohemia has advised forum users to change their passwords on all websites and services where they set the same password.
The hacked DayZ forum has over 200,000 members, but it’s unclear if all of them are affected by the incident. The game developer says it’s in the process of replacing the IPBoards login system used until now with Bohemia Account, a custom-built service currently utilized for the company’s other forums and store.
“We ask for your patience over the next few days and weeks as we implement this and other security overhauls, as there are likely to be service interruptions and forum unavailability from time to time,” Bohemia Interactive told customers. “In particular, the forums will be down until migration to the Bohemia Account is complete.”
The source code of the breached website (forums.dayzgame.com) shows that it was powered by Invision Power Services’ IP.Board forum software. The DayZ forum had been running IP.Board 3.4.9, the latest version of the software, released in late December. A security patch for a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was released by IP.Board developers on January 21, but it’s unclear if the flaw could have been exploited to breach the DayZ site.
This is not the first time hackers have targeted DayZ and Bohemia Interactive. In 2012, attackers breached the DayZ mod forum and uploaded a piece of malware, and in 2013 someone hacked into Bohemia’s systems and downloaded usernames, email addresses and passwords.
Bohemia Interactive is not the only major game developer to suffer a data breach in the past months. Last year, Epic Games, the developer of Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, reset the passwords of 260,000 forum users after its systems were hacked.
