On Monday the hacker collective Lulz Sec claimed responsibility for breaking into game company Bethesda's website, compromising users' personal information, passwords and email addresses. The group has just published everything it claims it took during the cyber attack at The Pirate Bay, except one: info pertaining to over 200,000 "Brink" players.
Bethesda issued the following statement via its blog this morning:
Over the past weekend, a hacker group attempted an unlawful intrusion of our websites to gain access to data. We believe we have taken appropriate action to protect our data against these attacks. While no personal financial information or credit card data was obtained, the hackers may have gained access to some user names, email addresses, and/or passwords. As a precaution, we recommend that all our fans immediately change passwords on all our sites — including our community forums and the statistics site we maintain for Brink players.
If your username/email address/password is similar to what you use on other sites, we recommend changing the password at those sites as well. As we don’t know what further plans the hackers may have, we suggest that you keep an eye out for suspicious emails and account activity.
We regret any inconvenience that these attacks on us cause for you. These attacks will be evaluated to determine if there are any additional protections we might take that would be prudent.
Lulz Sec had hinted about the attack at its Twitter page on Sunday. "Big lulz coming up in the near future," wrote the group. "Time to show these bitches how it's done." The tweet included the hashtags #Brink, #Bethesda and #ZeniMax. "Say your prayers, Brink users," it added.
Previously, Lulz Sec took credit for cyber attacks against disparate targets such as Sony Pictures, the FBI, PBS and Fox.
While it likely won't assuage Bethesda or its fans, the company is just one of many high-profile video game companies to be hacked in recent weeks. Nintendo was a previous target of Lulz Sec, while both Codemasters and Eidos found their websites compromised over the past month by unknown assailants.
As for why Lulz Sec opted not to leak Bethesda customer information, members offered a simple explanation: "We actually like this company." Indeed, the group says it's looking forward to the publisher's upcoming title "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" and fear that doing too much damage may impact the ship date.
