Sega's Websites Apparently "Hacked"

According to this e-mail sent to Sega Pass account holders (I know because I got one), the Sega Pass Web site was apparently broken into yesterday (June 16):

As you may be aware, the SEGA Pass system has been offline since yesterday, Thursday 16 June.

Over the last 24 hours we have identified that unauthorised entry was gained to our SEGA Pass database.

We immediately took the appropriate action to protect our consumers’ data and isolate the location of the breach. We have launched an investigation into the extent of the breach of our public systems.

We have identified that a subset of SEGA Pass members emails addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were obtained. To stress, none of the passwords obtained were stored in plain text.

Please note that no personal payment information was stored by SEGA as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.

If you use the same login information for other websites and/or services as you do for SEGA Pass, you should change that information immediately.

We have also reset your password and all access to SEGA Pass has been temporarily suspended.

Additionally we recommend you please take extra caution if you should receive suspicious emails that ask for personal or sensitive information.

Therefore please do not attempt to login to SEGA Pass at present, we will communicate when the service becomes available.

We sincerely apologise for this incident and regret any inconvenience caused.

We are contacting all our members with these recommendations.

If you have any further questions please contact SEGA customer support on csescalations@sega.com

The e-mail only addresses the Sega Pass outage but as of this posting some other sites such as the Sega forums are down for "essential maintenance". There is no word as to whether the outages are related.




Of course, I use the term "hack" loosely in this case as I have in the past. There are plenty of morons in the world that are unfortunately still smart enough to click a button on a window. Sadly, with the way most public Web servers are designed and configured these days, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can be a script kiddie on the Internet.

In a perfect world, the FBI or NSA would at some point track these kids down and throw them in juvenile hall. Until then, take preventative action and change your Sega account passwords.