Epic Games Looking To Boost User Security With New Features

It looks like the Epic Games Store is beefing up its security for the peace of mind of its hundreds of millions of users.

Epic Games has announced earlier this Wednesday that it will now implement several new security features, which the company hopes can stop the recent ‘attacks’ on various Epic accounts. The official press release stated:

The Epic account system powers Fortnite, the Epic Games store, and Unreal Engine. This account system has never been compromised. However, specific individual Epic accounts have been compromised by hackers using lists of email addresses and passwords leaked from other sites which have been compromised.

If you use the same email address and password on Epic as you used on another site which has been compromised, then your account is vulnerable to attack. To secure your Epic account, use a unique password, and enable multi-factor authentication.

While the company admits that individual Epic accounts have been compromised, it is adamant that the actual account system of Epic has never been. This may point to the casual usage of same passwords for different services, and according to Epic, the attacks on the compromised accounts were more than likely caused by same passwords entered on different sites.

Epic is rolling out a multi-factor authentication tool, the primary purpose of which is to protect your account from unauthorized access by requiring you to enter a unique code after a period of inactivity or logging into a new device. The authentication code may be sent through email or through an app on your phone, for convenience. The press release goes on to state:

We recommend using a smartphone app authenticator like Authy, Google Authenticator or other services to help store and manage your MFA codes.

We also support email authentication. When using email MFA, your Epic account is only as secure as your email account, so be sure to properly secure your email account.

The company has also stated its plans to introduce an SMS-based authentication, which can be more convenient to players in certain parts of the world.

In the near future, Epic is also planning to implement an email verification process and a compromised account detection tool. It also gave some advice to users with regards to their external account security, something which every user must be able to do on their own end. Epic Games accounts have recently reached 250,000,000 users, and these security changes may help with less attacks in the future.