THE BUZZ: Star Trek Online and Champions Online creator Cryptic Studios has just discovered evidence of a database hack that occurred back in December 2010.

The studio released this statement:

“As part of our ongoing efforts to monitor and enhance security, we recently detected evidence of an unauthorised access to one of our user databases,” the company revealed. “The unauthorised access occurred in December 2010, and evidence of this has just been uncovered due to increased security analysis.”

“The unauthorised access included user account names, handles and encrypted passwords for those accounts. Even though the passwords were encrypted, it is apparent that the intruder has been able to crack some portion of the passwords in this database. All accounts that we believe were present in the database have had the passwords reset, and customers registered to these accounts have been notified via e-mail of this incident.”

“While we have no evidence that any other information was taken by the intruder, it is possible that the intruder was able to access additional account information. If they did so, the first and last name, e-mail address, date of birth (if provided to Cryptic Studios), billing address, and the first six digits and the last four digits of credit cards registered on the site may have been accessed.”

“We have no evidence at this time that any data other than the account name, handle, and encrypted password were accessed for any user.”

Cryptic promised to investigate the incident further and update users accordingly.

EGM’s TAKE: Now any database hack is bad for a developer, but this happened more than a year ago. If the hackers were going to do anything with the data, surely they would have by now? Basically if your data was stolen you should know about it by now. People went mental when Sony took weeks to inform people of a hack, try years. It’s good that they didn’t just sweep it under the carpet after the hack was discovered, however it’s bad publicity that Cryptic really didn’t need.