There’s no denying it. Cyberattacks are accelerating. This time, it’s Sega that’s been attacked, losing 1.3 million customer records, including logins and passwords.
So far (and it’s Sunday, so information is notoriously hard to come by), we have no information that credit card information has been stolen. Even so, 1.3 million customer ids and passwords (and password reset questions, presumably) means that it’s time to change all your passwords (again!) and be sure to check your bank and credit card information on a daily basis.
I’m of mixed feelings about these attacks. They’re illegal, of course. And they cost companies millions, if not billions. But I know personally how often senior executives have ignored warnings about these sorts of possibilities, and so, while no company, person, or government should ever be attacked, it’s important to take these ongoing attacks as an even stronger warning.
Beef up your security, folks! If you haven’t been listening in class so far, this is yet another wake-up call
Information taken includes names, birth dates, e-mail addresses and passwords, according to e-mails sent by Sega to affected customers. The information taken was part of Sega’s “Sega Pass” system, a registered account system Sega maintains for customers interested in newsletters and other information, and used for registering some Sega games with online components.
Sega is the latest game maker to have its databases hacked. The company acknowledged Sunday that information on 1.3 million customers has been stolen from an online database - though credit cards aren’t part of it, Sega assured customers.
Information taken includes names, birth dates, e-mail addresses and passwords, according to e-mails sent by Sega to affected customers. The information taken was part of Sega’s “Sega Pass” system, a registered account system Sega maintains for customers interested in newsletters and other information, and used for registering some Sega games with online components.“To stress, none of the passwords obtained were stored in plain text,” read the e-mail, which was sent from Sega’s European offices.
Payment information associated with the Sega Pass accounts was stored by external service providers, according to Sega, so credit card information was not exposed in this infiltration.
Sega said it has reset the passwords for Sega Pass customers as a precaution. Sega Pass remained offline as this article was posted.
Both the number of accounts and severity pales in comparison to the colossal failure of Sony’s PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment servers in April, where hackers stole information on more than 100 million users.
The Sony network failure made the company a target in the crosshairs of hacker groups, which have tried to infiltrate other Sony online serviceswith varying degrees of success in the weeks since.
One of those groups, which bills itself as LulzSecurity (or LulzSec), has gone above and beyond to distance itself from Sega’s troubles.
“@Sega - contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down,”reads a tweet posted to LulzSec’s Twitter account.