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Electronic Arts has apologised for a data breach that compromised the personal information of up to 1,600 candidates who had signed up for its FIFA 20 Global Series competition.
Though the publisher was able to pull the page within a half-hour of it going live, the brief window it was available compromised the data of up to 1,600 competitors, with personal information such as dates of birth, country of residence, email, and EA ID, being shared with other players via the website.
An update on the EA SPORTS FIFA 20 Global Series registration page issue from October 3. pic.twitter.com/t5R6HwYd3I
— EA SPORTS FC (@EASPORTSFC) October 4, 2019
“At approximately 1pm UK time, we announced the registration portal page for the EA Sports FIFA 20 Global Series,” EA explained in a statement shared on its social media channels. “Shortly after, we learned that some players trying to register were seeing the information of other players who had already signed-up through the registration page. We immediately took action to shut down the site by 1.30pm UK time. We were able to root cause the issue and implement a fix to be clear that information is protected. We’re confident that players will not see the same issue going forward.
“We’ve determined that approximately 1600 players were potentially affected by this issue, and we are taking steps to contact those competitors with more details and protect their EA accounts. Players privacy and security are of the utmost importance to us, and we deeply apologise that our players encountered this issue today.”
The statement closed by saying registration for FIFA 20 Global Series would reopen in the “coming days”.
EA unveiled its financial results for the first quarter of the financial year 2020 in August (that’s the three months ended June 30th 2019) and it seems that digital is still going through the roof for the publisher, despite not having released any title during in Q1.
“Digital net bookings for the trailing twelve months was $3.73bn (£3.07bn),” the report stated, which represented 76 per cent of all net bookings and a five per cent increase year-on-year.
For the three-month period ended June 30th, digital was prominent. Total net revenue reached $1.209bn (£997m) during that period. Only 13.2 per cent of that revenue was made out of physical products, which represented $160m (£132m), while digital net revenue reached £1.049bn (£866m) – so 86.8 per cent of EA’s total revenue came from digital during Q1 FY20.
The gap between physical and digital is widening year-on-year, as for the same period in 2018, packaged good represented 15.8 per cent of the total net revenue ($1.137bn/£939m). Total net revenue for the three-month period ended June 30th 2019 was up 6.3 per cent year-on-year.
