Bethesda Softworks Site Hacked *Again*

[Ratwar]

Hey guys, just a public service announcement. The official Bethesda Softworks site has been hacked. To quote Bethesda:

Over the past weekend, a hacker group attempted an unlawful intrusion of our websites to gain access to data. We believe we have taken appropriate action to protect our data against these attacks. While no personal financial information or credit card data was obtained, the hackers may have gained access to some user names, email addresses, and/or passwords. As a precaution, we recommend that all our fans immediately change passwords on all our sites -- including our community forums and the statistics site we maintain for Brink players.

If your username/email address/password is similar to what you use on other sites, we recommend changing the password at those sites as well. As we don't know what further plans the hackers may have, we suggest that you keep an eye out for suspicious emails and account activity.

We regret any inconvenience that these attacks on us cause for you. These attacks will be evaluated to determine if there are any additional protections we might take that would be prudent.

So yeah, if any of you have accounts over there, best to be watchful and change you passwords pronto!

[Gandalf]

Hey Rat, do we know who the hackers are?

[MARS]

A group called LulzSec. Check the thread in Multimedia. There's been more talk there than in this one.

[J-Sano]

The kid has just been caught, a 19 year-old planned the whole operation and was caught whilst hitting another target by police forces. Hope that little [&@%!] gets what he deserves for hacking Bethesda.

[JockoBeans]

There have been several more arrests in Europe.

[J-Sano]

Another anti-sec hacker group called TeaMp0ison claimed to have taken down LulzSec and Anonymous both in one hit. It seems TeaMp0ison gave LulzSec an ultimatum to secure their servers before they get hacked, they said that LulzSec's open publicity about hacking high-secured have got them agitated. Also a high-profile hacker that goes by the name of th3j35t3r (The Jester) has attacked LulzSec as well and both TP and Jester have posted whereabouts, locales, addresses, photos and IP's of LulzSec members.

Long story short, this ended before it even started with LulzSec getting maimed from left, right and center. Maybe they'll think twice before acting like 10 year-olds and publicising target acquirements.

Also, the group Anonymous was under heavy fire after the US executed 40 search warrants and FBI raided a crapload of houses in a area where Anonymous was operating in most, all electronic devices used by Anonymous was siezed. Here's a comment one of the hackers from Anon made...

"A note of context: "LOIC" here refers to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a software tool used in the Anonymous DDoS attacks that can flood a network connection with data."

"I used LOIC during that whole Wikileaks fiasco. The FBI showed up at my door with a search warrant for any electronic devices that may have been used in the attack. That means any and all computers, unless I pointed out to them which one was used in the attack. I'm not retarded, I invoked my 5th amendment rights and didn't say anything so now they are taking everything. Yes, I'm f**king dumb. No, I didn't have time to thermite the hard drive. I'm worried that the FBI might stumble upon this site due to all the :filez: on my computer."

The FBI yesterday reminded the public that "facilitating or conducting a DDoS attack is illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability."

Looks like they won't be getting out anytime soon.

[OtherworldOdd]

Wasn't LulzSec the group that hacked Sony?

[Arch-Mage Matt]

So yeah... Bethesda was hacked again. This was the message they sent out:

Dear Bethesda Forum User,
We have identified a potential breach of our forum user database that occurred Friday morning, Aug 12. We have reset your forum password as a precaution, in the event that any encrypted forum user passwords were compromised.
When you next try to login to the forums, your old password will not work. Click the "I've forgotten my password link" underneath the login boxes, and follow the steps to setup a new password for your account.
We recommend you do not use your old password or a password you have used for other sites. Further, if your old forum password was used for any other online purposes, we recommend changing the password on those accounts as well.
If you have any concerns, visit the following link:
http://www.bethsoft.com/eng/contact_email.php

[OblivionDuruza]

So every password has been reset? I'll have to go and fix mine it seems.

[AddictedtoMorrowind]

UESP ftw!

[Evil-i]

None of this is going to matter in the slightest after the next massive coronal mass ejection.

The internet is a fragile toy, and people should stop pegging the future of civilization on it.

[giskard]

Bleh, UESP is my home. They can have my account if they want. Haha

I am with you on that one Scozzar.

The report button on beths forums might as well be a "moderate your self" button for all the good it does.

Me and my site used to be attacked dozens of times a day from Beths forumse for simply making my mods my way by their moderators, certain mod teams and most of beths forums where convinced I should be punished for that crime. In the end I called in the UK police twice to deal with individuals and research the state laws for the state hosting Beths own server before threatening to take Beth to court unless they put a stop to it.

It cost me my account but they got rid of the moderator at the heart of the trouble and they delt with the trolls and their stalker recruitment practices. After denying everything of course.

Point is, it got stopped but it should have been stopped after the first report to Gstaff who simply did not want to know, so I do not consider that sites forums to be safe to use and probably never will again.

Hopefully beth will never let it get that bad again so nobody else will suffer as I did but in case they do revert to their old ways, I have kept all the screenshots and refer logs proving what went on, so I can still take them to court any time if the trouble flares up again.

[OblivionDuruza]

So I went through the process to get my password changed back, it's no biggie and it took me only a few minutes for anyone who's actually interested in the Beth Forums. They just send your email account a new password, and t's all fairly easy, although avatars seem to have been disabled for some reason. Does anyone know why?

Also, the UESP is great, but maybe this thread would be less cluttered if people didn't just post saying how much better we are than Beth's Forums? I mean, some of us actually use the Beth. Forums (although not nearly as much) and are interested in this news as it effects us directly. Just a thought. UESP is my home, and I don't need to be told that, but the Beth Forums still matter to me.

[giskard]

Talking of Database breaches

They are pretty common and it usually requires some sort of access to back end software used by admins, so its probably a bug with the version of Invision board Beth are using and unless they know it happened, the chances are it will happen again.

[Andere]

Don't know how serious the whole thing is, but I wouldn't oppose public hangings for hackers and such - not making a true suggestion, though.

A word about passwords: I've started to use Random Password Generator by Iobit. It's free, and I sure believe its passwords are harder to crack than my own. It also makes password creating very easy, and lazy people like me get a chance to make unique ones for each site... instead of dragging around the same one. Right now, I'm renewing all similar ones to unique ones.

[giskard]

Don't know how serious the whole thing is, but I wouldn't oppose public hangings for hackers and such - not making a true suggestion, though.

A word about passwords: I've started to use Random Password Generator by Iobit. It's free, and I sure believe its passwords are harder to crack than my own. It also makes password creating very easy, and lazy people like me get a chance to make unique ones for each site... instead of dragging around the same one. Right now, I'm renewing all similar ones to unique ones.

I found a skill i use to make up names for hundreds of characters in my mods usually works pretty well for passwords too.

Random Word 1 + Random Word 2 + Number or any combination those 3 things tends to provide a secure enough password.

But like i said, if they do not know how the hack was done, it will happen again and your passwords will not be good enough to stop them using your account. They can just take their time decrypting as many passwords in the database as they like. I would not be surprised if the method lulz used to get in to beths database has become common knowledge now and Beth and IPB are playing catch up trying to find the security hole and stop it.

Do not be surprised if Beth suddenly change their forum software.

[OblivionDuruza]

Bethesda will have to do something about it, as their database is obviously insecure at present, and there doesn't seem to be much stopping hackers attacking again and causing us to redo the process yet again. Only problem is that Beth is so close to the release of Skyrim, so I doubt they are really going to want to put resources into this issue.

Still, I think that the Random Pssword Generator is worth checking out. So thanks for the link Andere .

[Xarnac the Conqueror]

Did they get hacked again? I haven't been able to log onto Bethsoft for the last couple of hours.

[POMC S117]

Yep! They have.

In the meantime, make yourself comfortable!

[Xarnac the Conqueror]

Yep! They have.

In the meantime, make yourself comfortable!

Lame, do you think its really a hack, or maintenance, errors, or what? That's like three times in one month if its really a hack.

[POMC S117]

It's most probably a hack. But it could be that they are re-programming it to stop more hacks.

[BootySweat]

It's maintenance. According to Gstaff, today's outtage was actually planned since a couple weeks ago, long before they got hacked last week.

I think he said it would be down for about 4 hours, but perhaps I'm confused with the time it was supposed to start (4pm EST)

[POMC S117]

Ahh... That's good!

[BootySweat]

The site was back up briefly, but now it's down again

[Spiney]

I remember back in the day when FurAffinity was attacked weekly.

You all have it easy.