Bethesda Leaks Personal Data of Fallout 76 Players
Game publisher Bethesda accidentally leaked names, email addresses, street addresses of an unknown number of customers.
Game publisher Bethesda Softworks' customer support has goofed. Many users who were trying to redeem tickets for a Fallout 76 canvas bag were inadvertently given access to Bethesda's customer support system, revealing the names, email addresses and street addresses of other users.
Reddit user Jessiepie claimed to have received other people's customer-support tickets on her Bethesda account, containing emails and home addresses. On a Bethesda-hosted online forum, poster RadioactiveTrinket was able to see "all sorts" of tickets while trying to update his or her own ticket on Bethesda's support website. And a screenshot from Twitter user Jessie Tracy showed she was able to see the status of other customers' tickets ("Waiting on agent," "closed by customer," "investigation ongoing) on her account.
MORE: What to Do After a Data Breach
Bethesda claims this problem has been fixed. Specifically, a Community Manager stated "Hi guys, we've resolved this issue" in a forum thread on the subject.
Mysteriously, and somewhat infuriatingly, that's it. We don't know how wide-reaching this breach was, or how many people were exposed. It's not clear whether credit-card data was compromised, although one poster noted that only "card type" -- e.g., MasterCard, Visa, American Express and so on -- was listed in the visible support tickets.
The one comforting thing for those who may have been affected is that any suspicious characters who got your info from submitting a ticket probably had their tickets exposed as well.
There's not much you can do about this particular breach until we have more information from Bethesda, though if you're really worried about extra spam, you could switch to a new email address.
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Monica Chin is a writer at The Verge, covering computers. Previously, she was a staff writer for Tom's Guide, where she wrote about everything from artificial intelligence to social media and the internet of things to. She had a particular focus on smart home, reviewing multiple devices. In her downtime, you can usually find her at poetry slams, attempting to exercise, or yelling at people on Twitter.