For a short time on Wednesday, Eidos Montreal's official website and the Deus Ex: Human Revolution site were hacked and replaced with a banner that said “Owned by Chippy1337”. The banner also contained the handles and names of several hackers supposedly involved in the attack. The hack is allegedly the work of Gnosis, the group behind the attacks on Gawker Media last year.
Square Enix confirmed the hacks to Eurogamer today. A spokesperson said that 350 resumes of potential candidates were taken from Eidos Montreal's site and nearly 25,000 email addresses were stolen.
"Square Enix can confirm a group of hackers gained access to parts of our Eidosmontreal.com website as well as two of our product sites," the spokesperson said. "We immediately took the sites offline to assess how this had happened and what had been accessed, then took further measures to increase the security of these and all of our websites, before allowing the sites to go live again.
"Eidosmontreal.com does not hold any credit card information or code data, however there are resumes which are submitted to the website by people interested in jobs at the studio. Regrettably up to 350 of these resumes may have been accessed, and we are in the process of writing to each of the individuals who may have been affected to offer our sincere apologies for this situation,” they explained.
"In addition, we have also discovered that up to 25,000 email addresses were obtained as a result of this breach. These email addresses are not linked to any additional personal information. They were site registration email addresses provided to us for users to receive product information updates,” Square Enix said. “No dissemination or misappropriation of any other personal information has been identified at this point. We take the security of our websites extremely seriously and employ strict measures, which we test regularly, to guard against this sort of incident."
Deus Ex: Human Revolution's hacking minigame.
Eurogamer also spoke with ”Venuism” - one of the hackers listed on the defacement banner - who suggested the stolen information has already been leaked. Logs taken from the IRC chat the hackers frequented mentioned the leak of the “src”, which many have taken to mean the Deus Ex source code. Venuism said that is not the case, and the names listed are being framed.
"We are being blamed/framed because we share a history with some of the people responsible for this hack. The main perpetrator 'ev0' aka 'xyz' has a vendetta against us over this history. The reasoning behind it was most likely that he thinks we will get into trouble with authorities,” he told Eurogamer. "He isn't responsible for the 'hack' since he is not really capable, he is however responsible for defacing of the sites and the leaking of the information.”
"The majority of the people who knew and participated in the hack are from Gnosis, the group responsible for hack of Gawker late last year, who have insisted they are not Anonymous,” he added. "We knew about the hack yesterday, and one of us went as far as to contact Eidos to try and warn them about a potential data leak. They were, however, unreceptive and insisted in the event something like this happened it would be an internal matter."
Another day, another hack.
