Earlier this year the New York Times said that “there are now only two types of American companies: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked.”
Video game developers and publishers are no exception to this rule. Just ask OP Productions, the company behind the zombie-based massive multiplayer online (MMO) game “The War Z,” which recently announced that it was forced to take its game offline after its servers were hacked.
According to a message posted in place of the “War Z” forums—which are, at the time of this writing, still offline—OP Productions is currently looking into a security breach that compromised customer information.
"We are issuing this Security Alert to all Survivors as a precaution so you can take some precautionary measures on your own,” OP said. “We have already taken a number of steps to increase security and are continuing to work with external advisors and investigators to identify and implement measures to minimize the chance of this happening in the future.”
The company insisted that “no payment information” was “exposed” in the security breach since “all payments are made through a third party and not through our system.”
However, OP did note that other types of player information including email addresses and passwords associated with accounts for “The War Z” forums and the game itself were both compromised along with IP addresses and any other personal information posted on the forums.
"The security of your data is important to us and we want our players to be assured that we take this situation very seriously," the statement said. "We have taken steps to improve security to minimize the chance of this happening in the future and will continue to invest in improving security going forward.”
OP is advising all “The War Z” players to change both their game and forum passwords immediately along with any other accounts that use the same login information.
"This has been a humbling experience for us. While we all know that there is no guaranty of security on the internet, our goal is to try our very best to protect your data. We sincerely apologize."
Following a rocky launch last December, “The War Z” was officially released in February to overwhelmingly critical reviews despite positive early press coverage praising the uniquely ambitious concept of an open-world zombie survival game. The game currently holds a lowly score of 20 out of 100 on Metacritic.