According to the Salted Hash blog, a list of user details for gamers who have an account with Electronic Arts and their online gaming platform Origin was posted to Pastebin earlier this week. Pastebin is a web application which allows users to post text anonymously and share it with the general public. The information posted about users includes their email addresses, account passwords, and a list of games they purchased from Electronic Arts. Since some of the account details were previously released in other data breaches, the blog post notes that “It’s possible that EA wasn’t compromised, and instead the data in the Pastebin post was pulled from other data sources and combined.” Electronic Arts is behind some of the most popular contemporary gaming franchises including the FIFA and NHL series, Need for Speed, Mass Effect and The Sims. 

As the popularity of online gaming increases, gamers are becoming a lucrative target for cyber criminals. Online gaming accounts are typically connected with users’ credit card details to enable in-game purchases. Additionally, some games require the player to spend significant amounts of time developing their online characters and successful characters can sometimes be sold for thousands of dollars. Both the credit card details and in-game content are forms of currency which make cyber-attacks against gaming networks a potentially lucrative endeavor. As many people use the same account names and passwords across multiple platforms, such a breach can have an impact for users beyond the scope of the original targeted platform.  

According to the Salted Hash post, Electronic Arts issued a statement which reads, in part, “At this point, we have no indication that this list was obtained through an intrusion of our account databases.  In an abundance of caution, we're taking steps to secure any account that has an EA or Origin user ID that matches the usernames on this list.” Their blog also posted a statement from Sam Houston, former community manager for the Electronic Arts’ online gaming platform: “Those accounts are valuable not only for financial gain, but also for harassing or impersonating users. It's also worth noting that this dump could just be someone targeting EA in response to something. Over the years, EA has been the target of a lot of ire from various gaming groups, so this could be a response to a particular issue that people are upset about."