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A major eSports online community which jointly runs a CS:GO league suffered a hack back in December, with the hackers taking the details of over 1.5 milion user profiles and then attempting to hold them hostage for a ransom. As the profile details are now online, it doesn’t seem like they were very successful in getting that ransom.
The community in question is ESEA, who indeed did post up on December 30th that a possible hack of their user data had possibly happened although they weren’t 100% clear that it had. Now, on Saturday breach tracking site LeakedSource claims to have been able to obtain 1,503,707 ESEA user records, after ESEA didn’t pay the hacker’s demand of a $50,000 ransom. ESEA have now updated their hack warning saying “news has been made that ESEA’s user data has been leaked online. We expected something like this could happen but have not confirmed this is ESEA’s data” and since that change thanks to an effort from Reddit users and other large users, it has been all but confirmed that this data is from ESEA.
In an FAQ on the incident, ESEA say that they were “made aware of a security breach” on December 27th, in which “theft of certain user account information appears to have taken place.” Some questions have been raised about why it then took 3 days for ESEA to publicly announce that it was something that could possibly have happened, but there are some possible good reasons for it. Maybe they were working on fixing the weakness in their systems before they made any announcements to save another opportunistic hacker taking advantage; maybe they were checking to see just what could have been taken by the hackers; or even upon telling authorities they were advised to delay any sort of announcement. We just don’t know. The FAQ advises that all users change their passwords and security questions now just in case, as well as to keep an eye on their accounts for any suspicious activity.
As for what information got out, the leaked records include registration date, city, state or province, most recent login, username, forename and surname, the password’s bcrypt hash, email address, date of birth, zip code, phone number, website URL, Steam ID, Xbox ID and PSN ID.
ESEA say that they have now sealed up the breach in their systems and are working with the FBI to track down the hacker.
After its disappearance from Xbox Wire last week, and the official page for the game being removed from the Xbox site, rumours were abounding that the much-hyped Scalebound game might be cancelled. Well, Microsoft have given a statement and it’s not good news – Scalebound is indeed cancelled.
Previously scheduled for release on Xbox One and PC, Scalebound was originally revealed during the Xbox press conference of E3 2014, with Bayonetta director, Hideki Kamiya, as the new game’s director. However, since then and despite being near the tops of many anticipated games lists, the game has gone through numerous delays and news began to dry up. With the vanishing of the game from two official Xbox sources, it seemed that Microsoft had canned the game and today they confirmed that they had to focu on other games:
After careful deliberation, Microsoft Studios has come to the decision to end production for “Scalebound.” We’re working hard to deliver an amazing lineup of games to our fans this year, including “Halo Wars 2,” “Crackdown 3,” “State of Decay 2,” “Sea of Thieves” and other great experiences.
It’s disappointing news for people who were hoping that they’d one day get to try the game when they saw its trailer way back in 2014. It looked as if it might have promise, but now we will never know what might have been.
In an announcement over on its forums, one of the longest running source mods for Doom has ceased development.
First released before the new millennium in March 1998, ZDoom has been pretty much consistently updated since. Its last full release was almost a year back in Feb 2016, but ZDoom has acted like a foundation for a great many mods for the classic game and was, for a while, the only way it could be played on more modern Windows computers. Other source mods such as GZDoom have been built from it so the modding scene has plenty more foundations to build upon, but it’s still a very big deal within the Doom modding community.
Of course, even if official development has stopped, other people will pick up the torch instead and run with it. The site and forums will remain active still, and with GZDoom and other derivatives of the mod, we can just see this as the end of the first ‘form’ of the foundation mod that has lasted so long. Its successors will carry on the long-running modding community, and there’s no sign of it dying down any time soon.
With the trailer out and a release date of March 21st set, information is now being revealed slowly about the next entry into the Mass Effect series of games.
A few days ago, it was confirmed on Twitter by a member of the team working on the game that the PC version of Andromeda will have controller support which is hopefully going to be seamlessly able to switch to keyboard and mouse and back again to controller. But of course, the biggest question most PC gamers have is – what specs will my machine need to play the game?
During a time spent answering fan questions, again on Twitter, BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn addressed this question by saying that answers could be expected in February, when the specs were currently planned to release out to the public:
@wasmadeinthe80s Probably closer to launch. Sometime in February I think
This could be of course because right now Bioware isn’t 100% sure of the specs, given this is around about the time the game will be entering final testing so this is probably the time they’re really nailing down exactly what type of hardware is needed to get the game performing well.
There were also a few teasers about multiplayer details hopefully coming soon, so it seems that Bioware have the information releases all set up in a schedule ready for the game’s release in a few months time.
