There are few feelings in gaming quite like watching a month's worth of brutal, sweat-soaked progress vanish like a scav's loot in a firefight. Unfortunately, a sizable chunk of the Escape From Tarkov community got to experience that exact nightmare over the 2025 Boxing Day period, when a wave of malicious account resets tore through profiles like a grenade through a dorm room. Social media tags and boards tied to the hardcore extraction shooter were soon flooded with reports of wiped accounts, and streamers—because of course—took the brunt of the chaos.
The tragic Boxing Day surprise typically unfolded the same way. A player would boot up Escape From Tarkov, expecting their usual stash, their hard-earned gear, and maybe a few quests that still needed finishing. Instead, they were greeted by the cheerful character-creation prompt: choose a faction, pick a nickname, select a character model. In other words, the digital equivalent of coming home to find the locks changed, the furniture gone, and a stranger wearing your favorite hoodie.
The source of the resets appears to be a site vulnerability that lets a third party wipe accounts and alter details even when the owner has two-factor authentication active. That last part is the real kick in the teeth. Two-factor authentication is supposed to be the deadbolt on the door, yet in this case the intruder apparently sauntered in through a window. To make matters worse, at the time of writing, changing one's password did not log the malicious party out of the account. So the usual advice—'just change your password'—was about as useful as bringing a knife to a sniper duel.
At present, the only reliable solution seems to be contacting BattleState Games support and asking for the account to be locked, then logging back in with new credentials. It is not elegant. It is not fast. But in the wild west of Tarkov account security, it is at least a plan.
Although the vulnerability was not selective about its victims, the main targets in this wave of resets have been streamers. Popular names like DrLupo lost their account progress, and BAXBEAST was hurt especially hard. According to a social media post, BAXBEAST lost a level 53 account on the brink of Prestige 5, with the For Humanity ending already in the bag. For anyone who has not spent dozens of hours crawling through Tarkov's punishing quests, that sentence may sound like gibberish. For those who have, it sounds like a funeral.
Creator and Tarkov resource curator LogicalSolutions, who was also hit by a wipe, says BattleState Games is aware of the issue. That awareness is better than silence, but it does not magically restore a level 53 account or un-prestige a player's ambitions. Considering how time-consuming the new main story is in Escape From Tarkov, the lost progress has understandably caused a lot of grief. Tarkov already treats its players like a piñata; having a hacker smash the piñata and steal the candy is a special kind of insult.
Here is a quick breakdown of what the community is dealing with:
| Issue | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 🎯 Account resets | Players lost profiles and progress without warning |
| 🔐 Two-factor authentication | Did not stop the malicious resets |
| 🔑 Password changes | Failed to log the attacker out at the time of writing |
| 📣 Community response | Social media boards flooded with reports |
| 🎥 Streamer impact | DrLupo, BAXBEAST, and LogicalSolutions among those hit |
| 🛠️ Suggested fix | Contact BattleState support, lock account, then log in with new credentials |
For affected players, the practical checklist is short but grim:
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Contact BattleState Games support immediately.
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Ask for the account to be locked.
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Regain access with new credentials.
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Warn friends and keep an eye on official channels.
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Try not to stare too long into the abyss that used to be a stash.
It remains unclear whether the lost progress can be recovered. If it cannot, that would be one unceremoniously cruel way to escape from Tarkov. The game is available on Steam and via the BattleState Games website, but for the wiped players, the real question in 2026 is whether BattleState can turn this security dumpster fire into a lesson learned. Tarkov has always been a game about risk, loss, and the occasional miracle. Right now, the community is desperately hoping for the miracle part—preferably one that comes with a rollback and an apology.
In-depth reporting is featured on Game Developer (Gamasutra), where postmortems and security-minded dev discussions often underline how account systems can fail when session invalidation and backend authorization checks are weak—exactly the kind of gap implied by Tarkov’s Boxing Day resets that bypassed 2FA and left password changes ineffective until support could lock the profile.