Retrospective Review: Frequent Hacks Hit the Global Game Industry in 2011
By Date: 12-26-2011 Views:
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The fact that the global game industry is troubled by frequent hacks in 2011 has become the focus of the global media's attention. Particularly, the hacks which are intended to make fortune from user accounts and in-game items are really infuriating. Let's look back at these stories together.
The Japanese company Sony was attacked by hackers repeatedly after being hacked this April, e.g. a hack caused the leak of Sony's PlayStation user data, and Sony had to suspend game service for up to 1 month, which did shock PlayStation users around the world.
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Nintendo's website was also hacked soon afterwards. According to Nintendo, a hack hit its American subsidiary's website servers and caused user info leaking. This worsened the tense atmosphere created by Sony's PlayStation Network hack incident that was still unappeased!
Hackers attacked EA at the end of June, targeting at the forums of Neverwinter Nights. EA said on its official site that the servers pertaining to Neverwiner Nights' forums were the target of that complicated and illegal network attack, and even the best programs and software cannot keep in synchronization with hackers.
The Final Fantasy series' developer Square Enix failed to keep away from hackers' attacks too. With the official servers of its European branch being hacked, 350 applicants' resumes, 25,000 users’ email addresses, and some info about the new products were exposed to the public. Fortunately, users didn't suffer too big losses as Square Enix didn't save their credit card info.
In June, LulzSec initiated "Titanic Takeover Tuesday", and launched DDoS attacks against numerous targets. Its first target was the game magazine The Escapist, and the second one was EVE Online's login server. In order to protect EVE Online against hacks, CCP Games brought the game offline (now online). The third target was the IT security company Finfisher which was claimed selling monitoring software to the government. The other targets include the login servers of the sandbox game Minecraft and the online game League of Legends. Countless players were angry at the games' service suspension, and made efforts to stop LulzSec.
What Are These Hackers Trying to Do?
