Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Attack Nintendo, But Company Claims Data Safe
Dr Herbert West writes with this from the Wall Street Journal: "Nintendo said Sunday that a server for its US unit's website had been hacked into but that no company or customer information was compromised.
The hacker group Lulzsec, which allegedly was behind other breaches of Sony websites earlier this week, claimed responsibility. Lulzsec posted a server configuration file as proof of its involvement yet said it wasn't targeting Nintendo. 'We just got a config file and made it clear that we didn't mean any harm,' the group said this morning via its Twitter.' Nintendo had already fixed it anyway. The attack comes as Nintendo this week launches its new online service for its 3DS hand-held game machine."
The data is safe because they make you put in your CC info every time you make a purchase, instead of storing the data. This is something that people whine about and say Nintendo is being too cautious about every time they talk about the Wii Shop Channel. Still whining, trolls?
Also, if LulzSec doesn't get taken out soon, I'm fucking gonna find one of them and shit on their head. This is getting ridiculous.
Over 1,000,000 gold coins and several thousand mushrooms.
"We just got a config file and made it clear that we didn't mean any harm" - AKA they were unable to get to any meaty stuff, and now claim altruism rather than failure.
LulzSec would have been able to steal customer data (earning more lulz) if only the tacked on motion controls had been more responsive.
Brute forcing a waggle based password proved too difficult for this group of 1337 basement dwelling losers.
interesting. So they said "hey we can do this, you better secure your shit".
Is this a PR move by them or are they really worried about Nintendo's security?
I once found out by chance & server fault they where using it when I was like 12 or something, & back then OS X was still a 'thing'. Since they've gone through at least 2 major web design revisions...
..by Bowser but Mario always gets the data back.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
About five to ten years ago, out of boredom, I was trying to log in to various web servers via FTP. Some of Nintendo's allowed anonymous login that allowed one to traverse files on a few different networks. I don't recall how the setup was, but I do recall being able to see files on different lettered drives (C: drive, Z: drive, things like that). There were various files such as orignal artwork files in PSD formats for various video game artworks. We're talking original files, where when you view them at 100% file size, the character's eye fills more than height of a 800x600 resolution on the monitor. There was also access to data and image files related to upcoming video game releases, information that was going to be uploaded to some of their web sites, and so on. Lots of fun stuff.
Hopefully they've improved their security since then. I probably should have uploaded a text file to some visible locations back then with information in it on how insecure their setup was, but it was kind of neat being able to slip in and see what new files were being added, so you know...
> I can't think of anything Nintendo has ever done to justify this.
LulzSec was mad because their princess was in another castle.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Attacking these Japanese companies right after a natural disaster is like sneaking into a concentration camp to harass Jews to get extra lulz.
This is more humilating to Sony than to Nintendo.
Nintendo will get away with it unharmed, they have actually proven that people's data is "secure".
Sony on the other hand....
..
I wonder if this has anything to do with the FSF's "Brick Nintendo" campaign. Perhaps the hacker in question was trying to further the FSF's efforts with regard to bringing attention to the super-draconian TOS of the 3DS, but in the wrong way of course. Since this is not "Anonymous" it makes me think that the answer to the former hypothesis is "no" and this is just another immature teenager up to stupid sh*t.
Oh, BTW, have you bought and sent your bricks yet?
jdb2
I have to say, this is the first time the news of LulzSec hacking has actually made me mad. Everything else they've done could be argued to be altruistic, but this is just pointlessly lashing out at anyone they find. I can't think of anything Nintendo has ever done to justify this.
Actually, i wonder if this was intended as a PR move intended to help Nintendo with the primary intent actually being to further damage Sony. Sony's been in the news for weeks for getting hacked multiple times and losing tons of data about customers. Now Nintendo gets hacked, but it's pretty minor and no customer data was compromised. Doesn't that make Sony look even worse in comparison?
We've already got people in this very thread saying this means Nintendo's way of doing things is better Sony's. I'm not going to take sides on that issue, but if LulzSec's goal was to get people to criticize Sony in comparison to Nintendo then they seem to have succeeded.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Once he found out that the "data" was "corrupted"
Because attacking Nintendo would deter their closet obsession of furry fandom vehicles (Smash brothers, Pokemon). Its pretty obvious where this 'lulz' agenda comes at.
on the crazy off chance, just throwing this out there... that this is a marketing stunt by nintendo? lulsec is known and hot, humiliates the competition further, while boosting nintendo's credibility lulsec gets in the news again with another "sucsessful" exploit nintendo cares about me or was this just a senseless jab a big company for no reason?
You reasoning is not logical.
If they were, as you say, running Linux like Sony then that would possibly serve to explain a scenario where Nintendo were hacked in an identical way to Sony.
However, in this case, Nintendo did not suffer the same fate as Sony - therefore I can only assume that either:
a) the hackers were unsuccessful in their attempt to hack Nintendo, in which case it might be concluded that this was because Nintendo use an entirely different OS set up to Sony to which the hackers have less expertise in discovering flaws, or,
b) the hackers made a conscious decision not to attack Nintendo despite being able to use the same attack vectors on Nintendo as they did on Sony.
In both of the above, both Sony and Nintendo running Linux (if such is the case) does not serve to explain why Sony was hacked and Nintendo wasn't.
One must therefore conclude that your statement was an attempt at humour which failed dismally. But thanks for trying anyway.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Sigh. There is nothing remotely 'hackish' about this. I'm tired of the word 'hack' being hijacked- and if I were to be even more pedantic, I would say these folks are 'basement dwellers who couldn't hack their way out of a virtual box'. Though with ATD so fashionable, that might be too much.
:-)
Yes, I am a grumpy anonymous coward and proud of it. ARGH!
If you're running unpatched servers with no firewall and you've pissed off major hacker organizations, it matters not what operating system you run, you will be compromised.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
How long would it take if the authentification system limited ot to one attempt per hour?
If you are running servers that face the internet and you have pissed off major hacker organizations, you will be compromised. It makes no difference if you are running the newest patched versions because the majority of them have exploits that have not been patched and may not even be discovered by the developers of the software, especially with large, popular pieces of software such as Apache.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Its not what LulzSec says, but what it does that should be watched. It would be my guess that its not that they didnt intend to do Nintendo any harm, but there was no real harm to be done.
Theyll deface a no-body joe's website for the lulz and recognition of superior skillz, but they wouldnt do anything to Nintendo once they gained access? Seriously? This recent event with the Fed site, and the discussion of them trying to extort $, became them 'trying to string him along' to see if he would bite. Sorry, but I'm not biting.
I'm not for one second going to defend these obnoxious asshats, but my thoughts are these: 1) It's about time america realizes how much they're putting on the internet and how insecure it really is. 2) If these guys are announcing their exploits- I can't help but wonder how many times nintendo, sony, and other big companies were hacked, silently data dumped, and either unaware or intentionally not announcing it since no one else tipped their hat.
Also the same guys that keep trying to kill off homebrew and go around harassing the homebrew devs.
But what alternative do you recommend? Which maker of set-top video game appliances is friendly to homebrew devs?
Nintendo just gives you a short number. You give it to your friends.
The problem here is that online games on Nintendo platforms don't give me the choice to host a game for anyone who has added my friend code or whose friend code I have added. It works only for mutual friends: anyone who has added my friend code and whose friend code I have added.
out of all the companies, Nintendo is easily the most homebrew friendly.
Then please explain Nintendo's lack of anything even remotely like Microsoft's App Hub and Xbox Live Indie Games. For example, Nintendo rejected Bob's Game solely because it was developed at home, as opposed to in an office. Microsoft, on the other hand, encourages home development; its most significant requirement that I can see is that a game has to be written from the ground up for Microsoft platforms.
FYI, you can copy your data to an SD card, and then just remove the card.
From the page you linked: "Please note that while most game save files can be copied, some titles -- particularly those that have online play -- may not allow for the copying of save files to an SD Card." Every Wii game with WFC play that I own keeps the saved progress and the friend code credentials in the same SD card, and Nintendo doesn't want people copying friend code credentials.
But our data is in another castle!
see how many of them are adequate and how many of them are broken either gameplay wise (bad physics, unbalanced gameplay, etc.) or technologically broken (crashes, lags, etc.)
Technologically broken should be easy to define. I found one Android game that's technologically broken (Cordy), but that's because I played it on an Archos 43 with a resistive single-touch screen, and the game's control uses onscreen buttons that depend on the capacitive multitouch screen found in most Android-powered phones. As for broken gameplay-wise, is there a standard for defining "bad physics, unbalanced gameplay, etc." that the mainstream video game industry follows?
Personally, I'd go for the PC market
I would too for a single-player game or an online multiplayer game. But I don't see how viable a PC release would be for a game in a genre where multiple players are expected to be in the same room looking at one display, like a fighting game, a rhythm game, or a cooperative platformer. There's Trine and what else? A bunch of other Slashdot users tell me that this is because most people aren't willing to hook the family PC up to a TV despite that most LCD HDTVs have VGA and HDMI inputs for PC video.
However, in this case, Nintendo did not suffer the same fate as Sony - therefore I can only assume that either:
"I can only assume" - translation - My brain can only come up with two choices therefor there are only two choices.
Talk about logical fallacies. Jesus.. Its fun to watch your little defective brains at work here on slashdot. Can I buy you in a store somewhere?
And so it begins...
No matter what you think of what they have done -- in the long run what LulzSec are doing will have a positive effect.
I'm sure there are companies which haven't been taking security seriously that are now rushing to get the best security people they can find to secure their data. As they should have years ago.
You are far less likely to have a serious breach even under fire. Correct everything that can be accessed can be compromised, but the weaknesses are not necessarily known to every group of hackers. Do you think no large organized hacking groups take shots at google, microsoft, amazon etc...? Sure none have a 100% perfect rating, but more or less deflected at least 99.9% of attacks, even from organized groups. By your logic there would be a full list of all of the CC#'s for amazon.com online after the wikileaks incident, rather then a few minor interrupts to their service.
I'm leaning now toward the notion that LulzSec is a bunch of rogue IT Security guys. If I wanted to create a rapid, large spike in IT Security hiring, lots of high-profile attacks like this would be the way to go!
So "Nintendo had already fixed it anyway" but "we just hacked an FBI affiliated website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base". Maybe Nintendo should branch into the security industry, I bet a number of firms could stand to employ them.