18,000 BioWare accounts compromised via old Neverwinter Nights forum server

BioWare's confirmed that up to 18,000 accounts have been compromised on its forums through an old Neverwinter Nights forums.

The number consists of EA Accounts which were affected via a hacker that managed to gain access through a decade-old community server that was linked to the forums.

No financial information was stored, but usernames, passwords, email addresses and date of birth are thought to be affected.

"Yesterday (June 14), we learned that a hacker gained unauthorized access to the decade-old BioWare community server system associated with the Neverwinter Nights forums," studio GM of BioWare Edmondton, Aaryn Flynn, posted on the company's forums.

"We immediately took appropriate steps to protect our consumers’ data and launched an ongoing evaluation of the seriousness of the breach. We have determined that no credit card data was compromised, nor did we ever have or store sensitive data like social security numbers.

Flynn continued: "However hackers may have obtained information such as user account names and passwords, email addresses, and birth dates of approximately 18,000 accounts--a very small percentage of total users. We have emailed those whose accounts may have been compromised and either disabled their accounts or reset their EA Account passwords.

If you did not receive an email from us, or if your password still works for your EA account, your username and password were not compromised. Nevertheless, changing your password regularly is always helpful to protect your account."

The news follows recent compromises in the past week of personal info from Bethesda and Codemasters.