Forums Offline, Company Confirms Personal But Not Financial Data Stolen
Today, Sega became a part of the rash of Internet hacking that has plagued the world in recent weeks.
Several users of both the Sega Pass service and the Sega forums, which utilizes Sega Pass, have received E-mails from the company that state the service has been offline since late yesterday, and that “a subset” of accounts on the service were compromised. It is not clear exactly how many accounts were affected.
Compromised account data included E-Mail addresses, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords. Sega stressed no passwords are stored as plain text, and also stressed no financial information was compromised in the case of Sega Pass, as that is stored with a third party.
As of this article’s publication, the Sega forums are down for maintenance, and users are asked not to login to their accounts.
UPDATE: The Twitter account for the loosely banded group of hackers known as LulzSec, themselves responsible for several other Internet hacks of late, has issued a short statement distancing themselves from this particular incident, and even offering to track down whoever is responsible:
@Sega – contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down.
One of our News Tipsters, xTwoTails, received this E-Mail from Sega explaining the situation, and we have it below. If you’ve received this message, it means your account has been compromised, and it likely means you have to change your passwords to protect yourself.
We will have more on this developing story as it becomes available.
As you may be aware, the SEGA Pass system has been offline since yesterday, Thursday 16 June.
Over the last 24 hours we have identified that unauthorised entry was gained to our SEGA Pass database.
We immediately took the appropriate action to protect our consumers’ data and isolate the location of the breach. We have launched an investigation into the extent of the breach of our public systems.
We have identified that a subset of SEGA Pass members emails addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were obtained. To stress, none of the passwords obtained were stored in plain text.
Please note that no personal payment information was stored by SEGA as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.
If you use the same login information for other websites and/or services as you do for SEGA Pass, you should change that information immediately.
We have also reset your password and all access to SEGA Pass has been temporarily suspended.
Additionally we recommend you please take extra caution if you should receive suspicious emails that ask for personal or sensitive information.
Therefore please do not attempt to login to SEGA Pass at present, we will communicate when the service becomes available.
We sincerely apologise for this incident and regret any inconvenience caused.
We are contacting all our members with these recommendations.
Loading ...
Here we go again…
D:
These fucking losers need to stop.
Lulzsec group don’t have life.
Come on, why SEGA? =/
It’s one of the companies that likes to chill on the background, but no, they have to attack them.
*sighs*
Lulzsec want to help Sega? I know the love Sega but seriously, like Sega want one of the world’s most vibrant hacking organisations who took down companies like Sony on their backs.
Exactly what is the motive for hacking the Sega Forums of all places?
At least the PSN hacking made sense, considering that there’s credit card information from millions of people, but a forum?
Why? Noooo!!! PSN is understandable, as was their try for XBLA, but why SEGA?
@KrazeeKidd102
Hacker just want a challenge. They would do something like this just so that they could show others they did. Some hackers work with companies in order secure their systems (and they paid quite well), some hackers create their own systems and try to take it down, and some hackers just take down the big guys so they could gloat about it (which is what happened in this case) or to steal money or information (not this case).
WHY CANT THESE FUCKERS LEAVE US ALONE.
FUCK! I FUCKING KNEW IT! Why would they hack Sega?
Guys, Sega was hacked by a seperate group of people. Lulzsec like Sega.
wow hacked people be carefully becuase i have sega pass in sega.com website so try to stay away from people wierd one that are hacked maybe they should block it make another website while they find those hacked people. maybe segasonic.com/protect thats my idea.
Just to point out, they said that only “a subset of SEGA Pass members” were hacked, but that they “are contacting all our members with these recommendations.” so I don’t think receipt of the e-mail necessarily means your account was hacked.
At least I hope not, because I got the e-mail. Fortunately I have no real info on that and I put a not entirely accurate birth date. I only posted once for the Needlemouse trivia thing.
-_-lll This has GOT to stop . . .
No wonder it was going through maintenace without the usual message
I will personally destroy this group of hackers
Dang! Many companies are attacked nowadays. Again for lulz??
Well, sometimes people from the forums go to http://tinychat.com/sonicgenerations , so that could be a temp. replacement for ze forums…
@krazeeKidd102
AAANNND because they could ruin the reputation of lots of SEGA workers if they have stuff like passwords. There have been lots of people who have been impersonated on the Internet. Why would they want to do that? Because they may have a beef on a SEGA worker.
Maybe it could be hateful fans?
Like this one:
“In a sense, Sonic will have to die. SEGA needs a serious think-tank to develop a new vision for the hedgehog, and then needs to conduct extensive testing to ensure they create a new universe for Sonic that is engaging, challenging, and appropriate for all ages. This is not a Sonic we have yet, but it’s the Sonic we’ll need if there’s going to be any serious future for this series.”
Or this one?
“And that’s why its all the more tragic that sonic has only come this far since 1991. I mean the Sonic magic was really strong up to 98 because the Sega dudes focused design efforts on smoother mechanics. I mean the fact that sonic 1 was designed to be a fast game meant that they were all ready a popular alternative to mario. SO If They were in a leauge beyond mario (sonic Adventure 2 vs any 3d mario in 2001), why would they focus on outdoing mario over anything? THey could create a series that rivals something like pixar or the action/platforming games. And why was it always like Sega Japan/Us trying to do it by themselves. Why not ask like John Romero or Tim Schafer or John fucking lasseter or fuckin ANYONE like that to help them bring their already billion dollar franchise into the 2000s and make it something?”
^ Okay…?
@Vin
wait what?
You know like angry grad students.. with hacking skills….
I just put the uotes because those were to opinions about sonic that really seemed to symbolized dissillusionment with the franchise.
And that has nothing to do with this news.
…fuck
Didn’t they just hire a hacker to take care of their security?
@Komodin
Yes it does, because most likely the hackers are smart (grad-students) and it probably wasn’t this new group because they’re having fun attacking sony, or the fbi or the vatican or whatever. Its probably just fools trying to get sonic fans all worked up about sega. Hell, who says sega didn’t do themselves.
The quotes are also relevant because those where probalby on the forum before it got taken down.
@Ee
Yeah I was thinking about that myself. Didn’t seem like it did much good.
@Vin
“Hell, who says sega didn’t do themselves.”
You’re trippin’.
why the hell hack the forum of Sega? it makes no sense.
seriously. What the hell is that?
what can be achieved by invading a forum?
this is completely useless.
shit. This is ridiculous. this has to stop, and those responsible for this has to be located, apprehended and judged, prohibited to get close to any product that connects to the Internet for 20 years. daily should be required to write children’s books in manual typewriters.
I don’t understand why people wanna hack or get a kick out of it. It causes trouble and money for the folks and the company
Well all eyes are on sega now, not the hacckers…. What doesn’t matter is what the idiot (who still hasn’t revealed her/his name) and his motives. The pointis that now we are all locking to the sega gods to come from the skies and ensure us that the forums are all right.
As if their view of Sega changes Sega’s mind over their actions on everything… ha
Of all places….
Wow. That is so stupid.
Why them? Why attack Sega? I think Sega has been doing damn good trying to improve upon things of the past! There are somethings that just cannot change but hey I seriously think they are trying…I mean hell no one is perfect.
Also to anyone who thinks Sonic should be shelved look at this thought for a moment….if you shelve him….what about Mario? Link? Megaman? Pac-Man? What if you shelved them just cause of them dying in popularity? I was a local sheetz last night and a guy mentioned the decline of not only Sonic but stuff like Samus Aran…Link and I think even Mario too…So if you just shelved them just cause their stories are dying off in popularity would that eventually make them better in the future? Ask yourselves that and try to imagine gaming with out all of these icons…and see how long the gaming industry lasts…these icons all started us out in the beginning…and if they are left to die out…then look for the gaming industry to become well in my opinion very boring…what would there be? Halo? Unreal? Maybe Star Wars? Call of Duty? Basically shoot em up games and sports games. I for one don’t have a serious craving for BLOOD all the time. Yeah there might be RPG games still but without the starter icons….well you might as well declare video game apocalypse. Better yet Sonic & The Secret Rings….ERAZOR DIJINN ripping the words out of that story book…without the words you don’t have a story but without the idea, there is no story. Give it time…The stories will get better….I have faith they will. I do realize not all ideas are a good thing too but in this case I think the ideas have been picking up steam and revitalizing this series.
Also another thing…Does anyone notice how the old quote “ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO AN END” How all great things rise then fall so much further but also pick back up too. It happens….its like history pretty much. I may be an idiot but I see this so much with a lot of things and even in real life. It does happen. Most people don’t realize it but it happens lol.
inB4SEGAforumsareclosed
OFALLTHEFUCKINGPLACESWHYSHOULDTHEYHAVETOHACKTHEFORUMS!?
@Peoplerantingaboutforumhack All you guys are talkin’ about is “why did they attack the forums? why. why, why, WHY, WHYYYYYYYYYYYY!!11” Read my first comment or perish!!!! >:-)
Well I for one think sonic should NOT be shelved and if those petty bastards are trying to shake sega into doing that then to hell with em! That being said though, its going to take like massive synchronized effort to reinvent the series into something with more depth.
I think people are just hitting everything now. They tried it with Nintendo, Xbox, ps3, EA and loads more.
When will the hacking ever end?!?!?!?! Alot of companies have been hacked ever since the big shutdown of Sony Network. SEGA is now one of those companies. Its only a matter of time when Microsoft gets hacked. I pretty much expected this after the Sony hack and alot of companies as well prepared for the worse…… they didn’t have enough time to improve online security.
Some people are looking too deeply into this when trying to figure out the motive of hackers. It could simply be a hobby, doing it for kicks or they could just be looking to test out how well they can hack a loosely moderated forum that just happens to be SEGA’s main forum. I hope you people aware that forum attacks occur more often than you may realize =/
Just be glad that they didn’t touch any important info like your financial information or social security numbers.
Whoa the hacking is still spreading they are attacking a lot of companies wow but it doesn’t make sense why…I’m no a user of the Sega forums but why is this happening….
maybe it was some mario fans pissed at sega so they hacked it.
I here by declare 2011 as “random hackings that tick people off” year.
I know I’m late on this, what are the possibilities of SEGA forums coming back? I really miss it, it was part of my life ;_;