Another gaming company had customer data illegally accessed by hackers who copied e-mail addresses, encrypted passwords and birth dates stored in the Sega Pass database. Sega confirmed that no personal payment information was taken because they use external payment providers. On Friday, they indicated that all user passwords were reset and access was temporarily suspended. As of this writing, the Sega Pass is still unavailable to users with a message stating "We hope to be back up and running very soon."[1]

 Going back to Rob's diary [3] on Incident Response, it looks like Sega was well prepared (Preparation) and did a pretty good job at quickly informing its customers [2] that in incident had occurred, they identified their customer data had been compromised (Identification) and immediately isolated the incident (Containment).

Not sure why at this point so many video game vendors (Nintendo and Sony) have become the prey of hackers. In this case, there was no credit card involved, however, we cannot say the same for potential spam when 1.29 millions email addresses have been stolen; that is a sizable target.

[1] http://www.sega.com/sega-pass/
[2] http://playstationlifestyle.net/2011/06/17/sega-pass-database-hacked/
[3] http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=10768
 

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Guy Bruneau IPSS Inc. gbruneau at isc dot sans dot edu