Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

EA on in-game “hacking” :: “We Take Security Seriously”, hire Microsoft security expert

Gosh I remember when they were Electronic Arts:

FIFA 13 will receive tightened security in a bid to avoid the issues suffered by some in FIFA 12 with suspicious activity surrounding Ultimate Team packs, EA labels president Frank Gibeau has confirmed.

“We learned a lot from the experience. A lot of companies are suffering from this right now. There’s a lot of sophisticated hacking happening in the gaming industry and it’s a continuous battle,” Gibeau told Joystiq.

“We take it very seriously, put a lot of resources on it. The learning from the FIFA example last year has been incorporated this year. There’s some incremental and additional things. I don’t want to get too detailed because I don’t want to tip our hand. Rest assured, we take it very seriously.”

EA hired a Microsoft security expert to help combat the chances of future loopholes from within games, Gibeau said, adding that it’s a battle that can’t be won, but it is  that EA has to “continuously stay on top of.”%3

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Comments

One response to “EA on in-game “hacking” :: “We Take Security Seriously”, hire Microsoft security expert”

  1. Dave Walker

    Funnily enough, it was around the time when the first MMORGs were starting to happen was when I realised the game-context security benefit of a thin client architecture, back in my Acorn days. The inability to install cheats and bypasses client-side suddenly gets measurable benefit; I wonder whether the On-Live folk were putting as much emphasis on this as they could have.

    With client-side cheats and the increasing sophistication of in-game economics (particularly in Second Life, WoW etc), getting around (or, indeed, “gaming”) game security is big business – especially since game-derived income is all tax-free and will, by the distributed nature of game systems and the local nature of nation-states, most likely remain so.

    I’m surprised they hired an ex-M$ security expert, though; I’d have thought someone with a focus on large, distributed system security woud have been a more likely fit.

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