EA Just Got Hacked

While it's an exciting time for the games industry as a whole, it looks like it's a rather sour day for Electronic Arts. The company, apparently, has fallen victim to a security breach, with hackers making off with nearly a terabyte of data in the process. The source code for one of EA's biggest franchises was reportedly stolen in the breach as well, which definitely isn't good news.

The breach was first reported today by the folks over at Motherboard, who say that they've seen screenshots of messages posted to "underground hacking forums" that admit to the breach and stealing data. Those various forum posts explain what the hackers managed to make off with: source code for FIFA 21 along with matchmaking code for the game, source code and tools for Frostbite, and various EA frameworks and SDKs.

The hackers claim to have made off with around 780GB of data from EA's servers and seem to be trying to sell it to those who are interested in buying. Motherboard reached out to Electronic Arts, which confirmed that it's "investigating a recent incident of intrusion into our network where a limited amount of game source code and related tools were stolen."

The big question is whether or not customer data was stolen in the breach, but things are looking good on that front at the moment. EA tells Motherboard that no player data was accessed and that it has "no reason to believe there is any risk to player privacy." While that doesn't sound like a very definitive statement, it is at least good that there's been no indication of the breach affecting customer data yet.

We'll see what happens from here, but EA says that it has beefed up security and doesn't expect the breach to have an impact on its games. Still, even if things come out okay, this is just the latest in a long line of massive breaches at major publishers, and that should be an unsettling thing for a lot of gamers.