A blaze of Twitter messages has just erupted to inform Funcom’s community that all of its game forums have been breached by hackers and user information should be considered compromised. The breach affects all of Funcom’s forums, including those of Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, and The Secret World.
The full announcement is as follows:
Funcom have just discovered that user data associated with forum accounts on TheSecretWorld.com, AgeofConan.com, Anarchy-Online.com and LongestJourney.com have been compromised by a third party.
We regret to inform you that the data breach includes e-mail addresses, user names, and encrypted passwords associated with forum accounts on these forums. Even though passwords were encrypted, these can be cracked and should be considered compromised. It is important to note that forum accounts and game accounts are separate and are stored on different servers using different security systems. Game accounts have not been compromised.
The breach was possible due to a security fault in the vBulletin forum system. This security fault was corrected on our forums on August 19th, 2016, but we are unable to determine exactly when the data breach occurred prior to the fix.
As a temporary security measure, we have reset all passwords for every forum account on TheSecretWorld.com, AgeofConan.com, Anarchy-Online.com and LongestJourney.com. The next time you try to log in you will be told your password is incorrect and you will have to reset your password to continue. If you have used your old forum account password on your Funcom game account or any non-Funcom accounts, you should also change your password on those immediately.
We take this incident very seriously and will be taking measures to ensure it does not happen again. The bug that made this data breach possible has been corrected, but as a precaution we have taken our forums offline so we can conduct further investigations and ensure there are no more security issues before we bring them online again.