Friday, October 9, 2015

‘I would like to change the e-mail address of my account, please..’

What for some might just be a game for others it’s far more important, FIFA. The online football game in which you can play football games against other players online and create your own team has problems with hackers. These hackers aimed their hacks, in which they stole such called FIFA coins that can be bought by players, to high ranked FIFA players and well known YouTube FIFA gamers.

Top accounts were hacked
Just by asking the customer service to give them access to other accounts FIFA accounts were hacked. The hackers pretended to be the actual owners of the accounts and simply asked FIFA’s customer service if they could change the account into their e-mail address. FIFA’s customer service was clearly not paying attention that much and within minutes accounts from famous YouTubers like W2S, in real life known as Harry Lewis, who has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube. As you can see in this video he clearly wasn’t amused when he figured out how he got hacked. When he tweeted out that he got hacked EA quickly responded to help him out to regain access over his account. All the money he spent on FIFA was disappeared though but FIFA assured him they would solve this issue. These players are known to spend hundreds or even thousands of euros on the game so the financial consequences are pretty big as well.


Customer service
The quick response from FIFA was great and all but the real problem within this issue lies with FIFA’s costumer service. Apparently it’s that easy to hack into accounts that FIFA really should rethink their strategy about securing the privacy of their users. How is it possible that these accounts were hacked simply by asking FIFA’s costumer service team to change the entire account settings of their users. Frankly FIFA needs to step up their game and make this a priority issue within their FIFA game since this has not only happened to Harry’s FIFA account but it happened to a lot of other highly ranked FIFA players and creates an issue for all FIFA users and the security of their accounts. What do you think FIFA should do to improve the privacy of their users and the security of the accounts?

-Lennart Michels-

4 comments:

  1. Although Fifa isn't a bank or governmental institution, they could've paid more attention to the security of the accounts to prevent this issue! They can simply improve the privacy of the customers' accounts by asking a few (extra) questions to verify the users' identity, like; date of birth, address or other personal information they've saved in their database.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with Margarita, the FIFA could have done much more to prevent the hacking of the e-mail accounts. Especially, as these players are crucial for the success of the game, plus the lack of security is not exactly a good promotion.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I also agree with Margarita and Sarah, EA seriously needs to improve its strategy regarding customers' privacy and safety. Moreover, since Ultimate Team is what makes Fifa so profitable for EA, issues related to this game mode can really harm EA in terms of reputation and financial profit. As it is shown by the youtuber in the video, many gamers invest a great amount of money in this game but I doubt that they will continue to do it if they can easily get robbed.

    ReplyDelete