Security News Roundup: EA's Origin Platform, Adobe Forum Supposedly Hacked; Skype Patched Too

Wednesday was an interesting day for several service providers on the Internet.

For starters, reports surfaced that EA Origin accounts were being hijacked, including one owned by Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter. Origin users were alerted to the attack by email, saying that their account's email address or password – or both – were successfully changed. Thing is, these users didn't change their info, indicating that their accounts had been compromised.

Eurogamer points to threads on NeoGAF detailing numerous complaints from EA Origin users. Many have also reported that they've been completely locked out of their account, and faced a reluctant EA support team. One GAF member even took a step further by tracking down the user who took over his account, discovering the hacker to be based out of Russia.

EA eventually released an official statement regarding the hacking claims, but didn't approach the topic at hand directly. "Anytime a player has a question about the security of his or her account or personal data, we take it very seriously and take all possible steps to help," the company said. "For any customer who cannot access their Origin account for any reason, we ask them to please contact Origin Help or EA's customer experience group at help.ea.com."

Meanwhile. Microsoft faced a security issue of its own through Skype on Wednesday. The company suspended Skype password resets to fix a flaw that allowed hackers to gain control of an account simply by using an email address. The company said the issue affected a small number of users who have multiple accounts registered to one email address.

"We suspended the password reset feature temporarily this morning as a precaution and have made updates to the password reset process today so that it is now working properly," the company said. "We are reaching out to a small number of users who may have been impacted to assist as necessary. Skype is committed to providing a safe and secure communications experience to our users and we apologize for the inconvenience."

While Microsoft was busy patching Skype, Adobe was busy shutting down Connectuser.com, a community forum site for Adobe Connect Web users. A hacker named "ViruS_HimA" claimed that he broke into one of Adobe's servers, and copied a database containing email addresses, password hashes and other info of more than 150,000 Adobe customers.

As proof, the hacker published a limited set of 644 records with email addresses ending in adobe.com, .mil and .gov.

"As soon as we became aware of the hacker's post, we launched our investigation, which (based on the information leaked by the hacker) led us to determine that the hacker appears to have compromised the Connectusers.com forum site," said Wiebke Lips, Adobe's senior manager of corporate communications, Wednesday via email to Computerworld.

"We are in the process of resetting the passwords of impacted Connectusers.com forum members and will reach out to those members with instructions on how to set up new passwords once the forum services are restored," Lips added.

It's just another day in the virtual wild west. Time to pull out a paperback book.

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