Millions of gamers have been hit by a security breach at software publisher Ubisoft.
Up to 58 million usernames, email addresses and passwords at ubi.com have been "illegally accessed", Ubisoft said.
Gamers received emails asking them to set new passwords in the wake of the attack, which is just the latest big breach to affect networks run by games publisherss and companies. Ubisoft itself has been hit by two apparent security breaches this year alone. Meanwhile in January Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was fined £250,000 in the UK for failing to prevent a security breach which exposed millions of credit cards linked to its Playstation Network.
It is not thought that credit card details were stolen in the latest attack, Ubisoft said, because it did not store that information.
"We recently found that one of our Web sites was exploited to gain unauthorised access to some of our online systems," the publisher of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry 3 said in a statement.
"We instantly took steps to close off this access, to begin a thorough investigation with relevant authorities, internal and external security experts, and to start restoring the integrity of any compromised systems.
During this process, we learned that data were illegally accessed from our account database, including user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords. No personal payment information is stored with Ubisoft, meaning your debit/credit card information was safe from this intrusion."