The Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Eidos websites were hacked yesterday by a “splinter group” of Anonymous the defaced the front pages and stole personal information belonging to thousands of registered users.
Visitors to DeusEx.com received a rather nasty surprise yesterday: a log-in screen with an ASCII header claiming the site had been “Owned by Chippy1337,” with credit given to several pseudonymous users. The sites are back now but were down for several hours yesterday, according to internet security site KrebsonSecurity, which also acquired a log of the culprits discussing the hack on IRC. The attackers claim to have stolen personal information belonging to at least 80,000 registered DeusEx.com users, plus roughly 9000 resumes from Eidos.com They apparently plan to post the information on file-sharing networks.
The log also suggests that the splintering of Anonymous, if that’s what it can be called, is continuing. It was reported a few days ago that a “rogue admin” named Ryan had turned on the group and taken control of AnonOps; in retaliation, the Eidos attackers left behind “evidence” implicating Ryan in the attack, including his supposed real name.
“This is how those guys roll: one day they work together, the next they war. They drop dox on each other like it’s a game,” an anonymous Anonymous told the site. “Its like they hate each other but will work together on certain ops if it suits them, but then might turn on each other in the end… and then laugh it off.”
The group also discussed using the hack to disseminate a “nasty virus” through an exploit kit on the main page, although that part of the plan ended up going nowhere; one of the hackers dismissed the idea as impractical and recommended that the group stay focused on the “srs biz” at hand.
UPDATE: Square Enix has released the following statement regarding the attack:
Square Enix can confirm a group of hackers gained access to parts of our Eidosmontreal.com website as well as two of our product sites. We immediately took the sites offline to assess how this had happened and what had been accessed, then took further measures to increase the security of these and all of our websites, before allowing the sites to go live again.
Eidosmontreal.com does not hold any credit card information or code data, however there are resumes which are submitted to the website by people interested in jobs at the studio. Regrettably up to 350 of these resumes may have been accessed, and we are in the process of writing to each of the individuals who may have been affected to offer our sincere apologies for this situation. In addition, we have also discovered that up to 25,000 email addresses were obtained as a result of this breach. These email addresses are not linked to any additional personal information. They were site registration email addresses provided to us for users to receive product information updates.
No dissemination or misappropriation of any other personal information has been identified at this point.
We take the security of our websites extremely seriously and employ strict measures, which we test regularly, to guard against this sort of incident.
Published: May 13, 2011 02:29 pm