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Sega’s saggy security

1.2m user details hacked

The latest victim of a large scale attack is Sega Corp, which has admitted that security of its Sega Pass website database in Europe had been compromised. The personal information on all of its 1,290,755 registered users has been stolen.

Sega sent an email on Friday alerting the affected users, who are mostly based in Europe and North America, of the situation. Sega told customers that a subset of Sega Pass members' email addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were obtained, However, since Sega uses external payment providers, no personal payment information was obtained in the hack.

The Sega Pass system has been offline since Thursday, June 16. Currently this message appears, “SEGA Pass is going through some improvements so is currently unavailable for new members to join or existing members to modify their details including resetting passwords. We hope to be back up and running very soon.”

The company warned users that if the same login information is used for other websites or services, they need to be changed immediately.

No hacking group has been publicly associated with the breach yet but LulzSec, who have taken credit for the very recent attack on the Sony group which affected up to 100 million people, tweeted to Sega on Friday: “@Sega - contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down.”

Meanwhile LulzSec celebrated its 1000 tweet on Friday with an insight into the chaos collective’s manifesto.

Boasting of their attacks on several targets including “PBS, Sony, Fox, porn websites, FBI, CIA, the U.S. government, online gaming servers (by request of callers, not by our own choice), Sony again, and of course our good friend Sony,” the group defended its activities as the new digital order: “This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction.”

The group claims that its havoc-chasing is just a natural phenomenon to emerge out of the internet generation which is “attracted to fast-changing scenarios, we can't stand repetitiveness, and we want our shot of entertainment or we just go and browse something else, like an unimpressed zombie.”

It raises the ominous point that their acts should serve as a wake up call to the 'in-security' of online data, everywhere. “Do you think every hacker announces everything they've hacked? We certainly haven't, and we're damn sure others are playing the silent game. Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? …You are a peon to these people. A toy. A string of characters with a value,” LulzSec states. ®

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