Trion World, the developer behind the Rift MMO, has been sending emails to subscribers making them aware that accounts for the MMO have been compromised. Of course, they were attacked by “unauthorized intruders,” who remain unknown at this time.

Trion claims that “there is no evidence, and we have no reason to believe, that full credit card information was accessed or compromised in any way,” but that’s no reason not to take precaution. Just to be safe, the developer has reset all user passwords.

The post on the developer’s official site also lets players know that while they are investigating the issue, players should “have continued, uninterrupted access to Rift, and we do not anticipate any disruptions to your playing time.” Players will be getting three free days of play time for the issue, and a special item that increases their looted coin collection by 10%. We’ll have more on the issue as details come up.

Following a hack on their internal servers, Square Enix has taken down the official Square Enix Members site. This means players won’t be able to register any of the company’s products for prizes, edit profile information, or anything else dealing with the site’s services.  Both the US and Japan regions have been taken offline temporarily.

“We are assessing the full extent of this potential breach to determine what data, if any, was compromised and will provide more details as soon as possible. While some personal information may have been accessed, we can confirm that there is no possibility of any credit card information leak from this incident, since the server in question stores no credit card information,” as was issued in an official statement from the company.

Looks like credit card information is safe, so no worries there. What the hackers may have obtained is player library lists and emails. While this information can’t be too harmful, it’s still information lost. As Square details more about the situation, we’ll keep you posted.

In the last year, Sony has caught a lot of flack over a few major hacks that left people locked out of their network, and worse, with their personal information exposed. Of course, Sony isn’t the only company to see this sort of intrusion. Recently, Valve found themselves under attack, and their forums defaced.

The attack came just hours before one of the biggest launches of the year, Skyrim. Since the game requires Steam for authentication, this left users worried that there might be issues with the launch. Thankfully, this was not the case. For those of you who may not have had the luxury of activating your copy at midnight, you should encounter no problems, whatsoever. However, if you’re wanting to get on the Steam forums to discuss the game, or anything else, you’re out of luck. Valve head honcho, Gabe Newell addressed the concerns in the message below:

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

I definitely want to applaud Valve for their response to this issue. They made a swift response to the hack by not only taking the forums offline, but also by addressing the community and letting them know exactly what happened, and what actions they are taking. While it’s sad that it happened, and we certainly hope they find and patch the vulnerability that allowed this to happen in the first place, it’s good to see that no real harm appears to have taken place. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to go change your password.

A lot of Battlefield 3 players have been pretty upset by the fact that in order to play the game on their PC, they must install EA’s Origin client. After all, most people already use Steam, and don’t feel like loading down their computer with yet another piece of software that does little more than simply allow you to play a game. And since the game is only available on Origin, you have no choice but to download it. Or do you?

A group by the name of Razor1911 has released a piece of software that will allow you to completely bypass Origin altogether. That’s right, after unpacking the files found here, you’ll need only move the Battlefield .exe file to the folder, and double-click. The game will fire up immediately, without so much as opening Origin.

This does leave us with a few questions. The first being whether or not EA has the capability to find out if you are running Origin, and penalize you for bypassing it. Another is whether being forced to use Origin is any worse than being forced to use Steam for various games. Personally, I don’t like being forced to use any extra software that isn’t truly necessary. Valve has just done a good enough job with Steam that given the choice, I’d prefer to use it, rather than not. And that’s exactly what EA needs to do if they want people to get on board with Origin. Make it useful and unobtrusive enough that people actually want to use it. At least now, thanks to Razor1911, you have a choice.

DICE’s newest release is still very very young, but already very very vulnerable to people trying to cut corners any way they can.  Luckily, this recent glitch has been accidentally discovered by someone who does not want to release it to the public for the sake of the game.  This guy stumbled upon a glitch that makes him invulnerable to almost any attack and was able to successfully recreate the glitch in another game.

There’s no news of how this is done (and I wouldn’t include instructions in my writing anyways) and it will remain that way unless DICE fixes it.  He has contacted the game developer and let them in on the game’s threatening glitch, but he says if they fail to come up with a fix in a decent amount of time he will release the glitch to the public and force DICE to fix it.  I think that is the right decision by this guy and I commend him for it.

The glitch is pretty insane as you can see in the video below.  He says, “The only way you can die from this glitch is if you get shot by a shotgun, other than that you become immortal, you can survive any other type of bullet, explosive, and melee.  There will be no tutorial released to keep the game safe, however it has been reported to the developers, for a patch.”  Hopefully this is a one time fluke and nothing like this pops up in the future!

Reports are coming in that Battlefield 3 is already filled with hackers.  You guys on consoles are safe, though, since this only pertains to the PC version.  There have been tons upon tons of reports about these evil hackers, but I’ve only witnessed one in my 14.5 total hours of play time.

The only hacker I saw was using a pretty obvious aimbot to get up to about 100 kills in one single match.  This was pretty unnerving, but I stayed to verify that he was, in fact, hacking and to also see if any justice would be served by any admins.  Sadly, there weren’t any admins on at this time so he kept his reign until the end of the game.  Keep in mind, this was only one person in one server out of the total 76 matches I’ve played so far.  So there are hackers already, but they are few and far between.

Don’t fret too much, though.  DICE will surely kick it into gear on kicking these hackers’ butts.  I’m also sure PunkBuster will work together with DICE to fine tune the security measures when it comes to identifying and banning hackers in a quick manner.  I’m just happy that I haven’t seen any hacks like the one in the video below.  That hack was an exploit that took place during the beta.

More and more sources are coming out of the woodwork reporting that the hacking frenzy against Sony and the Playstation 3 isn’t over. As of today, it was announced that Playstation 3 had been hacked in a new form of the old PSJailbreak. This new hack has been given the name Jailbreak 2 or “JB2″.

Like the first Playstation jailbreak hack, this hack utilizes a USB dongle placed in the USB slot on the front of the PS3 in order to compromise the machine on start-up. Before the PS3 dashboard shows up, a list of options pop up only available for develops on their consoles. These options allow the user to manipulate the console and install code.

Older hacks against the Playstation 3 installed games directly to the hard drive, but Sony has fixed this in their extensive fight against piracy. This means that burnt Blu-ray discs are used with this hack.
A game is installed on the disc and the machine recognizes it as a legitimate game disc.

This new jailbreak is no good news for Sony. These hackers could make serious bank off of this and create a black market for Playstation 3 games. It looks like Sony is back to the drawing board to prevent this one from continuing. I think this will be the hardest to overcome. Maybe this will be the final straw that encourages Sony to move the PS4 release ahead a couple of months. If the whole thing is real, that is.

Every now and then, a group of tech-savvy gamers decide that they want to change something in a game. Companies are usually not terribly fond of these kind of alterations, and will usually send out a patch that will stop anyone from having whatever the hack was, or trying to do it ever again. However, such was not the case with EVE Online.

There is a giant TV in the Captain’s Quarters on the main screen of the game, and some hooligans decided to mess with some files in the client so that the TV would show whatever videos they wanted. Any other boring old company would get all huffy and try to completely destroy all of this effort. With EVE Online, however, they instead made a tool so that you can use this new hack appropriately. It almost seems ridiculous, but they provided an actual tool to help you do something that you weren’t supposed to do.

Not only that, they gave you complete access to pretty much any video on the web. That’s right, any. But they noted, “In a case of your cat accidentally downloading, converting and displaying some morally hazardous material on your screen, you’ll have to take it up with it rather than us, okay?” While this may not be a conventional way to handle this type of situation, it definitely gives them a better reputation with their gamer clientele. Not to mention it’s hopefully going to be a good business model for other companies out there.

It’s not terribly uncommon to find a house that has both a PS3 and an Xbox 360 in it. They sit there, staring at each other, silently fighting for your attention. Well wouldn’t it be better if they could put aside their differences and become one epic console? They can!

The machine you see depicted above is actually a 360 and PS3 all bundled up into one singular housing. No, they haven’t actually melded together to form the Megazord of consoles. Rather, they’re just sitting together in a very custom case. And yes, you can use them both at the same time.

A modder that goes by the name timofiend spent a good deal of time not only putting together this epic console, but documenting every step. If you head over to his site, you’ll find plenty of pictures, and a fairly detailed explanation of each step that was taken along the way. Just bear in mind that if you do try to recreate this yourself, you do run the risk of killing one or both of your consoles. But the payoff is pretty sweet.

The infamous hacking group LulzSec, the ones responsible for many downed servers, lost game time, and lost information for sites such as Sony, BioWare, Nintendo, EVE Online, and Minecraft, released a statement that claims they are finished with their campaign, and the Lulz Boat has officially docked for landing. They claim that Lulz Security is disbanding, putting an end to the network tyranny as of late.

In the issued statement, LulzSec says that their retirement was implemented as a plan from the start. Though this has been said, the group is still on the receiving end of angry chatter from other hackers, and a document claiming to be a company roster has been circulating the net. In a torrent released to the net, many pieces of information were released to the public. This is what can be found in the torrent:

50 Days of Lulz.txt 2.64 KiB
booty/AOL internal data.txt 63.6 KiB
booty/AT&T internal data.rar 314.59 MiB
booty/Battlefield Heroes Beta (550k users).csv 24.67 MiB
booty/FBI being silly.txt 3.82 KiB
booty/Hackforums.net (200k users).sql 111.2 MiB
booty/Nato-bookshop.org (12k users).csv 941.8 KiB
booty/Office networks of corporations.txt 3.87 KiB
booty/Private Investigator Emails.txt 2.52 KiB
booty/Random gaming forums (50k users).txt 6.08 MiB
booty/Silly routers.txt 67.7 KiB
booty/navy.mil owned.png 240.51 KiB

Originally, just as planned, the Lulz Boat was only meant to set sail for 50 days, and that final day of sailing has come. The group released this official last statement to the public at large, describing their “cause,” and attempting to explain their approach to their so-called “liberation”:

Friends around the globe,

We are Lulz Security, and this is our final release, as today marks something meaningful to us. 50 days ago, we set sail with our humble ship on an uneasy and brutal ocean: the Internet. The hate machine, the love machine, the machine powered by many machines. We are all part of it, helping it grow, and helping it grow on us.

For the past 50 days we’ve been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others – vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love. The raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy. It’s what we all crave, even the seemingly lifeless politicians and emotionless, middle-aged self-titled failures. You are not failures. You have not blown away. You can get what you want and you are worth having it, believe in yourself.

While we are responsible for everything that The Lulz Boat is, we are not tied to this identity permanently. Behind this jolly visage of rainbows and top hats, we are people. People with a preference for music, a preference for food; we have varying taste in clothes and television, we are just like you. Even Hitler and Osama Bin Laden had these unique variations and style, and isn’t that interesting to know? The mediocre painter turned supervillain liked cats more than we did.

Again, behind the mask, behind the insanity and mayhem, we truly believe in the AntiSec movement. We believe in it so strongly that we brought it back, much to the dismay of those looking for more anarchic lulz. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we’ve gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling. Please don’t stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve.

So with those last thoughts, it’s time to say bon voyage. Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind – we hope – inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love. If anything, we hope we had a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere. Anywhere.

Thank you for sailing with us. The breeze is fresh and the sun is setting, so now we head for the horizon.

Let it flow…

Lulz Security – our crew of six wishes you a happy 2011, and a shout-out to all of our battlefleet members and supporters across the globe

With all of that being said, do you think it’s safe to say that the Lulz Boat has officially been decommissioned? A lot of people out there seem to find the group’s reasoning nothing short of faithless excuses to exploit information. LulzSec claims to want the “power and freedom we deserve,” but does that come at the cost of innocent users’ information? What about the people in limbo here? Many people are still at risk of being taken advantage of due to the vast amount of information released by the hacker group.

Either way, if the Lulz Boat is officially done for, maybe things can start to return to normal. No more downed servers for weeks, no more sitting idly by while our favorite games are unable to be played, and no more worrying what’s lurking at every corner, right?