Earlier this week, CSO Online reported that a Pastebin containing hundreds of Origin account details, including email addresses and passwords, had been leaked online.
Although the Pastebin has since been taken down, around 600 accounts beginning with A – F were completely exposed amongst the mostly redacted data.
EA’s John Reseburg has denied any reports of a data breach saying:
“At this point, we have no indication that this list was obtained through an intrusion of our account databases.”
Despite this, EA has stated that they are taking precautionary measures in securing the compromised accounts.
This isn’t the first time EA has dealt with a purported security breach in recent years. Last December, users on reddit claimed their Origin details had been leaked and they were charged for games they did not purchase themselves. EA denied that the account breaches were related to any internal Origin database leak.
Furthermore, the company has admitted to losing up to 40,000 usernames and passwords from their FireMonkeys studio forums in September 2013.
As always, EA advises users to abide by good account security standards.
“Privacy and security of user account information are of the utmost importance to us. We encourage our players to use Origin user ID and passwords that are unique to their account, and to report any activity they feel may be unauthorized to EA customer support at help.ea.com.”
CSO Online compared some of the leaked data to previous leaks on Have I been pwned?, a website where you can find out if your usernames or emails have been compromised in a past web security breach. They found that most of the data appeared unique, thus it was not information gathered from previous hacks.
We’ll have to see how this pans out with EA’s overall security in the coming months. It could also be a good time to beef up your Origin password if you have an account. I know I will.
