It seems like just about every day there’s some sort of news about a data breach on the web, whether it’s from a major supplier of meat, fossil fuels, or a gaming company. CD Projekt Red was hit earlier this year with a hack that was likely fueled by financial gain. This time around, Electronic Arts (EA) has become the victim of a cyberattack which pruned important pieces of data from the company regarding its FIFA and Frostbite properties.
As spotted by Vice, the first reports of the hack were reported by the hacker forum Motherboard. In the forum that was visible to the outlet, it seems the attackers got away with valuable data used by EA developers. There were 780 GBs of information stolen. In it, the attackers got away with FIFA 21 source code along with code used for its matchmaking server.
In the past, it was well known that EA had been pushing its developers to adopt the Frostbite engine for many of its games. EA franchises like Battlefield, FIFA, and Star Wars Battlefront I & II utilize the engine that’s now in its third iteration. That source code was also taken. Reports indicate there were several crucial development tools obtained and are also seemingly now for sale on the internet.
EA mostly quiet on cyberattack
EA hasn’t spoken publicly or acknowledged the hack on any of its social media platforms. However, a statement was given to Motherboard from an EA spokesperson, stating, “We are investigating a recent incident of intrusion into our network where a limited amount of game source code and related tools were stolen.”
It doesn’t look like identifiable individual player information was part of the attack. In some cases, companies will store customer data separately for instances such as these to mitigate further damage from cyber threats. However, this doesn’t mean future cyberattacks can’t happen to EA again.
