Square Enix hacked

Final Fantasy maker, Square Enix, has just been hacked into – with a couple of websites belonging to Japanese video games maker being compromised. What of the damage? Well, Square Enix has been man enough to own up right from the start (guess they have learnt well from the Sony snafu recently) by confirming that up to 25,000 customers who did register for product updates might have their e-mail addresses stolen. Apart from that, resumes of 350 people who applied for jobs in the Canadian office could also have been copied from Web servers, leading the company to issue the following statement, “Square Enix can confirm a group of hackers gained access to parts of our Eidosmontreal.com website as well as two of our product sites. We immediately took the sites offline to assess how this had happened and what had been accessed, then took further measures to increase the security of these and all of our websites, before allowing the sites to go live again.”

Graham Cluley, a consultant at security firm Sophos, have issued a warning that both leaks might just see problems knock on the doors of the individuals concerned, since gamers might be e-mailed by an impostor who wants to appeal to their curiosity by getting them to click on a link or run some malicious software. This is a classic case for identity theft, missing only credit card information (which Sony wasn’t so “fortunate” with, so to speak).

Square Enix claims that no information had been distributed, so we will take their word for it – unless the hackers decide to tell the world otherwise, of course.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Hacking, Square Enix