It's been a dodgy few days for the games industry. If we're honest it's been a bad couple of months on the information security side of things.
Since Sony took the Playstation network offline on April 20th the gaming world has been rocked by a series of attacks from hackers, seemingly all with the aim of accessing the details of as many gamers as possible. Whether this is for more malicious reasons than simply to prove they can is unclear, but it's a worrying event that has seemingly spawned several more copycat attacks in the last few days.
The Wall St Journal reported on June 6th that Nintendo had been hacked by LulzSec, although no customer data was taken it was still worrying that someone was able to breach the security of one of Japan's biggest companies
On June 10th it was revealed that British games developer Codemasters had also been hacked by an unknown party. A spokesman for the Dirt series developers told BBC news that no payment details had been taken in the "significant" theft. An email from Codemasters to it's users recommended changing any passwords associated with their accounts. Gamers were also advised to be vigilant against unsolicited phone calls and e-mails requesting information from users who may have had their data stolen.
On the same day that Codemasters was hacked, Epic games also reported an incident in which user details were obtained by hackers. They released the following statement.
"Our Epic Games web sites and forums were recently hacked. We're working on getting them back up and running, and expect everything to be restored in a few days.
The hackers likely obtained the email addresses and encrypted passwords of forum users. Plain text passwords weren't revealed, but short or common passwords could be obtained by brute-force attack. Therefore, we're resetting all passwords. If you have an account on the Epic Games forums, you can request to receive your new password by email it to the address we have on file for you.
The Unreal Developer Network (UDN) has not been compromised. None of our web sites ask for, or store, credit card information or other sensitive customer data.
We're sorry for the inconvenience, and appreciate everyone's patience as we get our servers back under control. "
Finally, today we got the news that Bethesda had been compromised by the same group that had hacked Nintendo in what they described as an "attempted unlawful intrusion". In a post on the official Bethesda blog the company stated that "While no personal financial information or credit card data was obtained, the hackers may have gained access to some user names, email addresses, and/or passwords." Bethesda echoed Codemasters warning that users beware of any unsolicited emails or phone calls.
These are worrying times if you're a gamer, especially if you're signed up to any developers or console makers services. If i can offer any advice it would be the same as Codemasters and Bethesda have offered, please be vigilant, be aware of any emails or phone calls you may receive, and frankly speaking don't sign up for any services with your real details if you don't have to.
Stay safe.
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