The Japanese games' publisher Koei Tecmo was targeted by hackers who compromised the company's English language website and stole confidential data belonging to over 65,000 users. Following the attack, Koei Tecmo announced that they have temporarily shut down their US and European website as a precautionary measure.
The Japanese publisher announced in the press release
that “Within the website operated by KTE, the ‘Forum’ page and the
registered user information (approximately 65,000 entries) has been
determined to the data that may have been breached. The user data
that may have been leaked through hacking is perceived to be the
(optional) account names and related password (encrypted) and/or
registered email address.”
In the press release, the publisher further stated that users
do not need to worry about personal financial information because
they do not store this confidential information about the users.
Referencing the reports of Bleeping Computer, the hacker
has leaked critical information about users' accounts for free on a
hacker forum like IP addresses, email addresses, and passwords.
Founded in 2009, following the merger of 'Koie' and 'Teo',
Koei Tecmo is a Japanese video game and anime holding organization
that is responsible for many popular PC and console games like
Hyrule Warriors; Age Of Calamity, Dead or Alive, Nioh 2, Atelier
Ryza, to name a few.
The attackers assert that they have used a
spear-phishing campaign to hack the koeitecmoeurope.com website on
December 18th. The operators behind the attack also claimed that
they were deliberating to sell a forum database for 0.05 bitcoins
or about 1,300 dollars on a hacking marketplace.
As per the reports by Bleeping Computer, stating their
malevolent motives, the hackers told that they have “leaked the
data to punish the Koei Tecmo publisher because they were not
following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines
and they were refusing to spend the money on encrypting the users'
information and were using a fragile salted MD5 hashing algorithm
from 1992 and further warned them if they do not use the strong
encryption techniques, we will continue to attack
them”. Read more https://www.ehackingnews.com/2021/01/japanese-games-publisher-koei-tecmo.html
