EA has confirmed reports that hackers have taken over several high profile FIFA Ultimate Team accounts

The original takeover reports emerged last week via Eurogamer, which noted that several high-profile FUT traders had reported that their accounts had been taken over and stripped of FIFA points and coins. According to the report, the attackers, using gamertags taken from FIFA leaderboards, were able to convince EA support staff that they did, in fact, own the account. The representatives then revealed the email addresses attached to the gamertag and reset the account passwords, allowing the attackers to log into the accounts and delete them.

Just got hacked boys, finally people can stop blaming me for the hacks xD

I plan to take legal action, they gave my account to a random person via the live chat, a clear breach of data protection laws

Was a fun ride, see u guys in 23 I guess❤️

— FUT Donkey (@FUTDonkey) January 5, 2022

This hacking thing has really pissed me off. I did a good comparison on stream today

Its like ive locked all my work tools to do my job in my work van. Only for the van company to go ahead and hand the keys to a random person on the street without informing me

Fuming

— bateson87  (@bateson87) January 2, 2022

After investigating the claims, EA has now confirmed that it is responsible for the security breach.

“Through our initial investigation, we can confirm that a number of accounts have been compromised via phishing techniques,” EA wrote. “Utilizing threats and other ‘social engineering’ methods, individuals acting maliciously were able to exploit human error within our customer experience team and bypass two-factor authentication to gain access to other player accounts.”

EA currently estimates that fewer than 50 FIFA accounts have been taken in this way and is now working to find out who the rightful owners are and restore all stolen content. It also promised that steps will be taken to ensure that this sort of thing is less likely to happen again in the future.

• All EA Advisors and those assisting with servicing EA Accounts are receiving new one-on-one training and additional team training, with a specific emphasis on account security practices and the phishing techniques used in this particular case.
• We are implementing additional steps to the account ownership verification process, such as mandatory administrative approval for all email change requests.
• Our customer experience software will be updated to better identify suspicious activity, flag at-risk accounts and further limit the possibility of human error in the account update process.

It also warned that these new steps “could affect customer experience wait times”, in other words, make them longer, but added that they are necessary to ensure better account security.

The reaction to the changes amongst FIFA Ultimate Team fans on Reddit seems generally positive so far: Longer wait times for support requests isn’t great, but neither is the idea that some smooth talker can make off with your account credentials if they connect with a sufficiently inattentive support rep. The situation isn’t fully resolved yet, though.

Source: noticias