Sega Latest Victim In Hacking Spree

Video game maker Sega on Friday notified customers that personal information on 1.3 million users of its Sega Pass service had been stolen by hackers.

The attack is the latest in a string of high-profile data thefts whose targets have included Citigroup, the International Monetary Fund, the US government and video game makers including Sony and Nintendo.

Payment data

The stolen data includes names, birth dates, email addresses and encrypted passwords, affecting users mostly located in Europe and North America, Sega said.

Because Sega uses external payment providers, no payment data was affected.

Sega discovered the breach on Thursday and shut down the Sega Pass service immediately, the company said.

“Sega Pass is going through some improvements so is currently unavailable for new members to join or existing members to modify their details including resetting passwords. We hope to be back up and running very soon,” reads a message currently on the site.

Hacker group Lulzsec, which has been implicated in the attacks on Sony and others, said it wasn’t behind the Sega incident, and offered to help track down the perpetrators.

“Sega – contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down,” Lulzsec said in a Twitter post.

Sega was formerly a leader in the market for video-game consoles but pulled out in 2001 following poor sales of the Dreamcast console.

The most serious of the recent hacks includes the Sony breach, in which account data for more than 100 million customers was stolen, and a Citigroup breach in May, in which more than 360,000 credit card accounts were affected.

Lulzsec offers aid

Lulzsec, whose attack targets have included the NHS and the CIA, celebrated its 1,000th tweet on Friday with a message outlining its worldview and the motives behind its attacks.

The group’s attacks are the result of boredom and a resulting aimless search for cheap thrills, Lulzsec said.

“This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction,” the group tweeted.

The Internet by its nature encourages such behaviour, Lulzsec said.

The Internet generation is “attracted to fast-changing scenarios, we can’t stand repetitiveness, and we want our shot of entertainment or we just go and browse something else, like an unimpressed zombie”, the group tweeted.

Lulzsec said its actions should provide material for reflection on the stablity of an Internet-based world.

“Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked? We certainly haven’t, and we’re damn sure others are playing the silent game,” Lulzsec tweeted. “Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? You are a peon to these people. A toy. A string of characters with a value.”