Security

Microsoft has moved to insist that its Xbox Live service hasn't been breached, and that the ongoing glut of account thefts are the result of phishing attacks. The company's statement comes after one user managed to track down the hacker who had stolen her account and spent over $300 on Microsoft Points using her stored credit card details, and found websites with thousands of Live accounts up for sale. More >

An Xbox Live user whose account was compromised and used to purchase thousands of Microsoft Points has identified the hacker involved, and discovered websites where accounts are up for sale. In a lengthy post on Tumblr, the user explains that her account was compromised not once, but twice, despite Microsoft having insisted the account had been locked. When she queried this with Microsoft she was told: "The fraud department was unable to block your account." More >

Facebook apps and games will be disabled tomorrow unless their developers convert them to support HTTPS, as the social network makes secure data transfer mandatory. More >

Speaking to Game Informer at last week's Tokyo Game Show, Sony Worldwide Studios' Shuhei Yoshida said the company realised the time taken to update PS3 firmware was excessive. "It's very annoying when you only have one hour in your busy life to play a game, and when you have to spend 30 minutes out of that one hour to update the hardware," he said. "So it's not necessarily the frequency of how we update, it's the intrusiveness of the current process we have on PS3 and PSP. I cannot talk about specific plans, but we are very aware of the issues, and we'd like to address those issues on PS Vita."

A post on the Quakecon website reveals that its ageing forums have become the latest videogame website to be hacked. "In recent days, a hacker carried out an unlawful intrusion of the old forums.quakecon.org site, compromising usernames and passwords," the statement reads. It goes on to sound an increasingly familiar refrain, advising affected users who use the same login details elsewhere to change their passwords.

EA has restored service to its free-to-play Battlefield Heroes following last week's attack by now disbanded hacking group, LulzSec. EA issued a statement to Eurogamer: "Service has been restored on Battlefield Heroes following a short hiatus related to a security breach. Our investigation is ongoing, however it appears screen names and encrypted passwords associated with an early beta version of Heroes have been compromised. To the best of our knowledge, it appears that no personal data was compromised – no emails, account history, credit card numbers or payment methods. Any further updates will be posted on this page. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Mike Hayes, CEO of Sega West, told Eurogamer last month that the firm had upped security in the wake of the PSN outage. "We did a security audit as a result...it was just a good housekeeping exercise," he said. "We made a couple of changes to our security systems. I'm sure most people have done the same...fortunately we seemed pretty solid so we didn't have to do too many additional changes." On Friday Sega admitted its Sega Pass system had been hacked, with the details of some 1.3 million users taken in the attack.

EDIT: CCP has clarified the effects of the attack to us - "The second attack did not indeed bring down the Eve Online servers, but instead caused some temporary connection issues for a small portion of our playerbase. Others did remain unaffected and were able to play without incident. We have no evidence that any Eve Online user information was compromised at all." [Original story below]

General manager Aaryn Flynn confirms an attack on the developer's decade-old community server to which the Neverwinter Nights forum was linked. No credit card data was compromised but the login details, email addresses and birthdates of 18,000 registered users "may have" been taken by hackers.

"I think we were very aggressive in the way we tried to get the information out to consumers as quickly as possible," PlayStation boss explains in an extensive interview. "You need to do your due diligence before you make a statement. We also wanted to try and garner as much information as possible before making any announcements. So I don't think we 'waited' a week. I think it took a week to make sure that we had enough information that was credible."