PoE 2 player accounts target of mysterious hack. Devs at GGG released new details
We learned the details of the hacking of PoE 2 player accounts. It happened due to a bug, and a minimum of 66 people were affected.
At the end of December, posts from players whose accounts had been compromised by hackers began to appear on the Path of Exile 2 forum, as a result of which they lost valuable items. At that time, Grinding Gear Games stated that they were unable to return the stolen goods, but they were looking into the matter. Now we have learned new details.
At least 66 robbed accounts
Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts, the duo behind PoE 2, recently appeared on the Tavern Talk podcast, where they were asked if there had been a data breach at the developers' studio. Mark reported that there was indeed a situation in which one Steam account was hacked.Thanks to this, the hacker gained access to the administrator account on the PoE 2 website.
Over time, the devs have reached the details of how this happened, although they still don't understand the "full scope" of the situation. Mark explained that one of the Steam accounts was linked to the administrator account, but its owner wasn't aware of it, which sounds quite strange. The hacker used Steam's technical support for the break-in, and since he didn't use the account, no malicious activity was detected on it.
However, the reason it remained unnoticed in PoE 2 was a bug in the system. Usually when the administrator account makes changes, they are recorded in the log. However, due to a password change error, they were recorded as regular notes, which can be easily deleted. That's exactly what the hacker was doing, which is why GGG didn't notice any suspicious activities.
Then Mark confirmed that 66 notes were deleted, which means that the same number of accounts were compromised. However, the history only covers the last 30 days, and the hacker started operating 5 days earlier, so the exact scale is unknown.
The full report with all the information will be published in the next few days. It was reported that, luckily, the hacker couldn't access the servers, and once the team understood the situation, they promptly reset all passwords and ended sessions to maintain security. Since then, there have been no violations of the accounts.
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