Is it just me, or did the Sony hacking fiasco encourage everyone else to hack a game company? Epic, Codemasters, and Nintendo have all been recently hacked for personal user data, and now Bethesda has been as well. In Bethesda's case, the page compromised was the Brink website. According to Bethesda, the only data that has been stolen is usernames, passwords, and email addresses. This must be pretty rough for PS3 Brink players, considering that they weren't able to play online before, and now they may have their data accesssed.
On Friday, Epic Games had it's web site and forums taken down, due to hackers having recently circumventend Epic's security. Epic says that the hackers only obtained "the email addresses and encrypted passwords of forum users. Plaintext passwords weren't revealed, but it's possible that those passwords could be obtained by a brute-force attack on the encrypted passwords." The Epic site is online again now, and Epic founder Tim Sweeney says that no financial data was accessed.
Codemasters was also hacked on Friday. It was the same situation as Epic; personal data was stolen, but financial data remained safe. The hacks occured on the Codemasters corporate website, the Codemaster eStore, and the Dirt 3 VIP code redemption page. The personal data stolen included names, addresses, date of births, gamertags, and encrypted passwords.
Over the weekend, Nintendo was also attacked. "We have learnt of a possible phishing threat to users of the European Nintendo website which we are currently investigating," said Nintendo Europe in a statement. "The protection of our customers is our utmost priority and so we have taken the precaution of immediately shutting down some parts of this website until further notice. We would like to reassure you that we do not hold our customer's bank, credit card or address details on the European Nintendo website and so this data is not at risk. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused. Please do get in touch with your local Nintendo Customer Services if you have any further concerns." A bit vague on Nintendo's part, but they get the point across; they were hacked and think that no information was stolen.
All of this hacking comes courtesy of Lulzsec (Lulz Security), a group of hackers who have done this only because they can. They have claimed all of the following above hacks, and have even released a torrent file including all of the personal information they stole from Bethesda. "Bethesda, we broke into your site over two months ago," reads the tweet from this morning. "We've had all of your Brink users for weeks. Please fix your junk, thanks! ^_^."
Hopefully, fewer sites are targeted in the future.
