Just days after Nintendo reported it had been the victim of a security breach, Konami, another popular Japanese video game company, has begun warning users that thousands of gamers may have had their information hacked.
According to a notice on its site (.PDF) earlier this week, Konami ID, a portal the company runs for gamers, was compromised and more than 35,000 users may have had their information accessed.
Much like the Nintendo hack, the Konami attack stemmed from a series of brute force login attempts conducted over the course of several weeks. From June 13 to July 7 attackers used stolen usernames and passwords and tried to log into the site 3,945,927 times, managing to succeed 35,252 times. According to the company, eventually “a large number of access errors were detected” on Monday, July 8 and Konami was triggered to look into the issue.
Also similar to the Nintendo incident, Konami reports the pilfered usernames and passwords appear to have been leaked from an external service provider, prompting curiosity as to whether it was the same third party provider that leaked Nintendo’s customer information.
Konami ID users’ names, addresses, date of birth, telephone numbers and email addresses may have been exposed according to the warning published Wednesday. It’s unclear if any financial information has been leaked but the company claims it hasn’t noticed any changes to users’ personal information or spotted any of the affected accounts trying to use the site’s paid services yet
As expected, the company is urging all users to change their passwords, especially if those users use the same passwords for sites other than Konami ID.
Konami has also claimed to have upped its security by raising its monitoring level and taking measures “to ensure that IDs and passwords involved in these unauthorized logins can no longer be used to log in.”
Konami, whose US offices reside in El Segundo, Calif. is known today for video games such as Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill, classics like Contra and Frogger and of course, the Konami Code: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A.
It was only on Monday that we learned that 25,000 of Nintendo’s Club Nintendo users had their names and passwords compromised last month as well. Hackers were able to force over 15 million brute force login attempts to glean information from an unnamed third party service associated with the company’s fan site.
*Image via popculturegeek‘s Flickr photostream, Creative Commons
