The websites of three more gaming industry staples have fallen to the recent round of hacks. Nintendo, Epic Games, and Bethesda have all been compromised recently. The first attack was on Nintendo’s U.K. site, which has had parts of the site taken down to increase security. The publisher has said in a warning that it is worried about numerous reported phishing attempts.
“We have learnt of a possible phishing threat to users of the European Nintendo website which we are currently investigating. 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,” said the warning.
“Phishing is when someone attempts to find out your personal information, such as usernames and passwords, by pretending to be a trustworthy person or company in an electronic communication such as an email or via a website,” it continues. “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.”
Epic’s intrusion was more substantial, with its main website and forums having been hacked. No financial information was taken, but Epic urges users to change their passwords immediately.
"Our Epic Games web sites and forums were recently hacked. After some downtime, they're back up and running now,” read a email sent by the company. "The hackers may have 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. Therefore, we have reset all passwords. Your new password is at the bottom of this message.”
"The Unreal Developer Network (UDN) hasn't been compromised. Thankfully, none of our web sites ask for, or store, credit card information or other financial data. We're sorry for the inconvenience, and appreciate everyone's patience as we wrestle our servers back under control."
Finally, Bethesda was also attacked, but the company managed to keep some data safe from theft. The publisher is still asking that users change their passwords.
“Over the past weekend, a hacker group attempted an unlawful intrusion of our websites to gain access to data. We believe we have taken appropriate action to protect our data against these attacks. 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. As a precaution, we recommend that all our fans immediately change passwords on all our sites — including our community forums and the statistics site we maintain for Brink players,” said the company on its official blog.
“If your username/email address/password is similar to what you use on other sites, we recommend changing the password at those sites as well. As we don’t know what further plans the hackers may have, we suggest that you keep an eye out for suspicious emails and account activity,” the message adds. “We regret any inconvenience that these attacks on us cause for you. These attacks will be evaluated to determine if there are any additional protections we might take that would be prudent.”
Are we in the middle of the hacking Olympics? These three companies join Codemasters, Square Enix, and multiple Sony subsidiaries as hacking victims. Will it ever stop?
