Fortnite pro Jonathan “Yung Calculator” Weber claimed that Fortnite account emails were being leaked to the public. Epic have responded, clearing the air.
Leaderboards are one of the most engaging elements of any competitive game. For top players, leaderboards allow them to see how they stack up against the competition – whether in a tournament or with a season-long competitive ranking.
In Fortnite, leaderboards are generally used for stat tracking and tournament placements. In the early hours of January 22, however, Fortnite pro Yung Calculator alleged that Epic Games were leaking sensitive information to the public.
In a Twitter video, the Fortnite pro alleged that leaderboards were leaking emails to the public, allowing bad actors to reset the passwords of popular players.
“That’s kind of bad on its own, but then if they have your email, they can send password resets to your account,” Yung Calc said. “That’s fine normally — on Twitter, it means nothing normally — but on Epic Games, it logs you out in-game.”
“This has happened to Clix, Nick Eh 30, Nate Hill — everyone,” he continued. “Epic Games has no idea what they’re doing. Their infrastructure is garbage. They need to change it — it’s disgraceful.”
Once this all came out, several people began pushing back. Data miner @FNBRUnreleased went so far as to say that something like this isn’t possible. “It is not possible to view the email of another person’s Epic [account]. Epic’s API does not work like that. I’ve been seeing this rumor from [Yung Calculator] spreading false information.”
Epic Games respond to leaking allegations
This all led to an official statement from Epic Games. After investigating reports, they issued a tweet telling their followers that this isn’t the case.
“We are certain that affected accounts remain secure, player info (incl. email addresses) isn’t being divulged & any logout issue is resolved.”
We investigated reports that leaderboards were divulging non-public information or causing unauthorized logouts.
This is not the case.
We are certain that affected accounts remain secure, player info (incl. email addresses) isn’t being divulged & any logout issue is resolved.
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) January 22, 2021
Yung Calc eventually deleted his tweet, saying that “I’m also deleting the original tweets since I say that Fortnite Tracker caused it, when apparently they didn’t.”
Pros were, reportedly, still getting logged out of their accounts at one point. On this front, Calc said, “I’m not a coder, don’t expect my knowledge to be 100% on that stuff. What I do know is that it def wasn’t Casper the ghost going around logging out pros.”
In the end, it’s good to know that our accounts aren’t getting leaked to the public. To Epic’s credit, they were quick to react to this news and put everyone’s minds at ease.
