Cyber ​​attackers make Phony Epic Games accounts with other people's e-mails

For months, an unspecified number of users trying to register an account with Epic Games discovered that their email addresses were already linked to accounts. Today, Epic Games has told Kotaku that the culprit is a cyberattack in progress and that the company is trying to delete these accounts, without specifying the number of people affected.

"I recently went to create an Epic Games account," wrote an informant named Ed in an email last week. "And I discovered that I already had an account. I have never created an account. Ed then explained how an account using his e-mail address was registered in Thailand. It was the same email he had used on his Xbox account. After going online, Ed noticed that dozens of other users had complained about Epic Games forums and Reddit. It had also happened to one of his friends. In a screenshot shared by Ed, his friend's user name appears as tNpPldH7g, a total nonsense.

Epic Games notes in an FAQ "account link" that an e-mail address can only be associated with one Epic account. On the Epic Games forum, a concerned parent wrote last June that his son wanted to link his PlayStation Network account to his Epic Games account so he could play it. Fortnite on their PS4, however, when they tried, they received the error message "Failed to link the account. Already associated with a different account. Commentators with the same problem then noted that they had difficulty receiving a clear answer from Epic about what was going on.

Today, Epic Games explained by e-mail. "We recently discovered an ongoing attack that consists of creating Epic accounts using known email addresses via a botnet covering more than 500,000 machines," said a spokesman. "We are in the process of deleting these accounts and adding more verification steps to account creation."

It is not clear why these cyber-attackers would like to create Epic accounts based on other people's email addresses. Kotaku reached out to two old Fortnite account hijackers to ask why anyone would create Epic accounts this way. Neither could explain.

Today, Reddit announced to the press that detailed information on approximately 600 Epic Games accounts had been disclosed online. When Kotaku We asked him if the Epic Games accounts link problem was associated with this leak, a spokesperson told us Epic's response to Reddit's initial thread, written by an Epic engineer: "The system accounts for Epic Games and Fortnite stores was not compromised. Specific individual accounts have been compromised as a result of numerous automated attempts by hackers to attempt to connect to Epic Games accounts using password / password combinations disclosed by security breaches. from other websites. The incidents do not seem to be related.