WiiNoob

Nintendo Server Attacked, No Harm Done

Sadly even Nintendo isn’t safe from the recent bought of online hacker attacks.

If you believed Sony was the only company to have hacker shenanigans recently, well think again mis amigos. On Sunday, Nintendo shocked the presses by acknowledging that its U.S. based servers were hacked into back in April.

Yikes indeed! In the very same month that saw Sony and its PlayStation Network going down in cyber-flames, it appears that the “House of Mario” caught the ire of mysterious web criminals too – an actual first for Nintendo to ever been targeted in a hacker attack.

Nintendo is quite the giant company – one of the game industry’s top performers – so an intrusion of this size is mega troubling, especially at a time when Nintendo is trying to prove that their online infrastructure can compete with the big boys. Thankfully for Nintendo, and equally important its customers, nothing was surprisingly stolen during the cyber-attack months ago.

In an emailed statement that accompanied the news about the server breach, Nintendo of America said: “The server contained no consumer information. The protection of our customer information is our utmost priority,” and lastly added “We constantly monitor our security.”

Unlike the PSN attack that went unclaimed in its culprit, this time the hacker group Lulzsec immediately confirmed that they were behind the attacks on Nintendo – notifying their Twitter followers (yes, sadly even they have one) by posting a “server configuration file” that they claimed belonged to Nintendo and then later Tweeted: “We sincerely hope Nintendo plugs the gap.”

Trouble, thy name is Lulzsec. The hacker group has recently been in the news for causing security problems for other companies in the past, like the recent hit on Sony Pictures Entertainment last week and against PBS television and Fox.com. Geeze, what do these people have against Big Bird and Mister Rogers?

With the Internet already in a buzz over cyber attacks and the U.S. Government questioning online personal data-keepers like Sony about online safety – it’s a bit worrisome about what this means about the overall future of a free and open world wide web. Perhaps Nintendo will address some of this issue when announcing their next console at E3.