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Gameloft shuts down Web games after security breach

Mobile-game developer says security breach was limited to "about 100 users," including people who were playing its Order and Chaos game on the Web.

Declan McCullagh Former Senior Writer
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. You can e-mail him or follow him on Twitter as declanm. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
Declan McCullagh
Screen snapshot from Order and Chaos CBS Interactive/Gamespot.com

Gameloft, a Paris-based video game company that's a leading mobile-game developer, acknowledged today that a security breach had prompted it to pull the plug on one of its Web sites.

Reports began surfacing on the company's Web forums earlier this week, suggesting that the GameloftLive.com Web site had been experiencing problems and that some accounts had been compromised. One poster suggested: "I told all of my friends to stay offline and they are doing so. I hope Gameloft gets this fixed."

In a statement to CNET this morning, a Gameloft representative said:

"Gameloft live Web version had suffered from a security issue. About 100 users saw their accounts impacted by this problem. And among those, there are players of Order and Chaos, whose accounts have been affected.

All users who have contacted us have been re-credited to their original account's situation. As less than 1 percent of Gameloft Live users accessed Gameloft Live through the Web version, we decided to close the web version of Gameloft Live.

All users who have contacted us saw their account situation restored. It is a priority for us to keep players' data protected.

Readers of CNET's sister site, Gamespot.com, gave the iOS version of Order and Chaos a rating of 8.3.

In September 2010, Gameloft announced it had reached 20 million paid iOS downloads.