Over the past few days, the FIFA community has mostly talked about FIFA Ultimate Team traders who reported that they were being targeted by hackers. Now, EA Sports has confirmed that those reports are true.
The developers behind the popular franchise released a statement today in which they respond to the aforementioned reports. They also announced a series of actions they’ll take to stop such situations from happening in the future.
“Through our initial investigation we can confirm that a number of accounts have been compromised via phishing techniques,” EA said. The company said hackers were able to “exploit human error within our customer experience team and bypass two-factor authentication,” which led to them successfully getting access to other players’ accounts.
Luckily, not many accounts were compromised in those attacks. No more than 50 accounts have been hacked by using the method mentioned above, according to EA. Naturally, the game developer reassured that it’s working on identifying the rightful owners of stolen accounts to restore their access to them.
At the same time, EA admitted to making a mistake and underlined a few changes it will implement to its security systems so that similar situations don’t happen again. “We know we must do better,” EA said.
First and foremost, all EA advisors and individuals who assist with service will undergo “individualized re-training and additional team training, with a specific emphasis on account security practices and the phishing techniques used in this particular instance.”
Aside from the new training countermeasures set to take place in the future, EA will be also working on the security systems themselves. Additional steps to the account ownership verification process will be implemented, such as managerial approval for email change requests. Customer experience software will also be updated to identify doubtful activities more successfully.
In the end, the company said that as a result of these changes, customer experience, especially regarding wait times, could be impacted. But it reassured that this is necessary so that similar takeovers won’t happen again.