Codemasters Unplugs Website Following Hacker Attack

Posted 06/10/2011 at 9:41am | by Paul Lilly

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One surefire way to thwart hackers is to turn out the lights and take your website completely offline. That was Codemaster's strategy, which was hit by hackers and promtply pulled the plug on its website "as soon as the intrusion was detected." Unfortunately for Codemasters and its customers, by the time the site and associated web services were taken down, hackers had already made off with the personal information of potentially thousands of customers.

"We believe the following have been compromised: Customer names and addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted passwords, and order history," Codemasters stated in an apologetic email. "Please note that no personal payment information was stored with Codemasters as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.

"Members' names, usernames, screen names, email addresses, date of birth, encrypted passwords, newsletter preferences, any biographies entered by users, details of last site activity, IP addresses, and Xbox Live Gamertags are all believed to have been compromised."

While it's comforting that payment details remained safe, personal data is a hot commodity on the black market where unscrupulous miscreants shop for information that can be used in targeted phishing attacks.

Codemasters is opting to play it safe by keeping its website "offline for the foreseeable future with all Codemasters.com traffic re-directed to the Codemasters Facebook page instead." The British game developer plans to launch a new site later this year.