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June 06, 2011

Nintendo Now Amongst the Hacked, Claims No Data Stolen

By Michelle Amodio, TMCnet Contributor

Shortly after Sony’s come-back from its two month-long outage after a serious hack attack, Nintendo hit the wires saying that it was also a victim of a hacking, but no data has been compromised.



The attack, which happened on May 16th, only targeted one of Nintendo’s servers but it didn’t expose any customer information.

LulzSec, the group responsible for said hack, posted data on the Internet that it said was a “server configuration file,” or data for programming purposes, from a Nintendo server, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“This particular situation was a server configuration issue that we investigated and resolved a few weeks ago,” the U.S. unit of Kyoto, Japan-based Nintendo said in a statement e- mailed to Bloomberg (News - Alert) News yesterday. “The server contained no consumer information.”

In a post on Twitter on Saturday, the group suggested that Nintendo might be spared some of the harsher intrusions it said it had directed at Sony.

“We’re not targeting Nintendo. We like the N64 too much – we sincerely hope Nintendo plugs the gap,” the group said on its Twitter account, referring to the company’s Nintendo 64 game machine, released in the mid-1990s.

No one at Nintendo explained why Nintendo took its time reporting the incident to the public, a little reminiscent of how long it took Sony to admit it had been seriously compromised with its own data hack. Nintendo is catching flak for sitting on the hack announcement for nearly two weeks, but emphasizes that no important customer data was compromised.

LulzSec also said earlier this month it broke into the website of Sony Corp.’s film unit and stole customer data. The group claims to have stolen the user data of 1 million people. According to Digital Trends, the data contained a variety of personal information, “including passwords, e-mail addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts,” the group said.

LulzSec seems to think it dons some pretty big britches.

On top of admitting to being responsible for Sony and Nintendo, the group says it hacked and defaced the web site of the Atlanta chapter of InfraGard (News - Alert), an organization affiliated to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and leaked its user base.

The group said that they had hacked the InfraGard site after NATO and U.S. President Barack Obama had raised the stakes with regard to hacking, by treating it as an act of war.

The website of InfraGard’s Atlanta chapter was not accessible late Sunday and returned the message that the site was “under construction” as the future home for the Atlanta InfraGard Member’s Alliance. A cache of the site on Google (News - Alert) search confirmed that the site was that of InfraGard Atlanta.

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Michelle Amodio is a TMCnet contributor. She has helped promote companies and groups in all industries, from technology to banking to professional roller derby. She holds a bachelor's degree in Writing from Endicott College and currently works in marketing, journalism, and public relations as a freelancer.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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