In what appears to be its second breach in 2011, Square Enix has confirmed that it has suffered an intrusion. Matt Mann reports:
Today Square Enix announced that both their Japanese and North American Square Enix Members sites have been hacked. According to Square Enix an unknown party gained unauthorized access to servers containing user information in both Japan and the United States. Square Enix Members service allows players to input codes in games to gain rewards; the site uses no credit card data so no one is at risk of loosing their credit card information.
Square Enix released the following statement about the hacking;
“We are assessing the full extent of this potential breach to determine what data, if any, was compromised and will provide more details as soon as possible. While some personal information may have been accessed, we can confirm that there is no possibility of any credit card information leak from this incident, since the server in question stores no credit card information. We estimate that the suspension will continue for a few days until we complete our investigation and counter-measures. We will update you as we learn more.
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In May, the firm acknowledged that hackers had broken into its system and may have acquired 25,000 customers e-mail addresses as well as 350 job applicants’ resumes.
Update: Square Enix now states that 1.8 million accounts were affected, but it’s not clear whether the accounts were really accessed or affected or not:
“We are yet to learn whether illegal access was gained to our clients’ information,” said a Square Enix spokesperson. “But we have asked our customers to be aware of the incident in case they receive suspicious messages using our name.”
Update 2 (Dec. 16): Square Enix says no personal data were affected. In an updated notice on its site, they write:
As a result of our continuing investigation into the unauthorized intrusion reported yesterday, Square Enix has now determined that user login credentials were not accessed. Moreover, we have not found evidence that the individual was able to access any personal information at all.
So they got a lot of concerning press and no personal data were involved? I think we should expect to see more of these types of situations as companies rush to notify for fear of being criticized for being slow to criticize.