Personal Data from 2.5 Million PSP and Xbox Forum Members Hacked and Exposed Online
The digital gaming market hasn't shown any signs of slowing down. In fact, digital gaming sales hit record sales figures amounting to over $61 in sales in 2015 alone. With the worldwide phenomenon of advanced technology filtering down into digital gaming and over 12 billion users taking to the Internet in some form to play online games, hackers are salivating over the amount of personal data they can scour from online gamers.
As it turns out, the personal data from over 2.5 million PlayStation and Xbox forum members was hacked and exposed online. A data breach that occurred in September 2015 on popular PSP and Xbox gaming forums on the Internet resulted in 2.5 million accounts being compromised containing the data of email addresses, IP addresses, and password hashes. Within the 2.5 million compromised accounts, about 1.2 million belonged to PSP users and the other 1.3 million where Xbox users who all utilized the popular PSP ISO and Xbox 360 ISO forums.
The Hacked Game Forums Solicit Pirated Game Copies
Online forums designated for gamers are widely popular as many of them provide help with gaming strategies, development information, and a social atmosphere to socialize with other like gamers. In the case of the attacked gaming forums in recent years, both PSP ISO and Xbox 360 ISO forums commonly helped provide gamers with illegal copies of PlayStation and Xbox games. Such activity is never condoned. Moreover, such unlawful and pirating sources are often the brunt of attacks as hackers and sometimes activists target the avenues that conduct unlawful activities.
One of the more discerning issues that we have with the recent attack on two gaming forms, regardless of their illegal motives, is that the data scoured nearly a year and a half ago is just now surfacing. With such a gap in time from the initial hack on the forum and the data just now showing up on the Internet on various sites, most of the data is probably obsolete as a good number of forum members have changed their passwords by now.
Hackers Dumped Millions of Gaming Forum User Records on Various Sites
Those looking to find out if their data has been dumped on a list of sites can visit the "Have I Been Pwned" site, which also provides of list of sites that data may have been dumped from the gaming forum attack.
As to the reason how and why the two gamer forum sites were attacked to hack data, it was due to weak security where they used hashes to store passwords instead of encrypting the data. Encryption of passwords is a common and recommended practice for websites that may require logins to access an account, such as in the case of an online forum site.
The perpetrators of the hack have yet to be discovered. However, the exposed data belonging to over 2.5 million gamers may lead to future issues if those affected don't take action to at least change their password to the forums mentioned above.