Anyone else really, really tired of hackers using game company websites as personal punching bags? After two grueling months of Sony's laborious effort to get its online systems back in order, various hacker collectives owning and disowning claims to a slew of targeted attacks, the US Congress getting involved, and no one being able to play SOCOM online, we thought maybe, just maybe, this whole debacle had finally come to a close.
Haven't Brink players really suffered enough at this point? Do we need to dig the knife deeper?
But hey, of course it hasn't, because there are still hackers out there who are total assholes, and they still think it's really hilarious to hack into game company websites and steal their users' personal information.
In this case, it's the rogue sect of self-righteous chuckleheads known as LulzSec, or Lulz Security. These are the guys who have, most recently, hacked into the websites of Nintendo, Codemasters, and Epic Games, seemingly for no reason other than "because they can," and in some cases ganking large chunks of personal user data (though so far, no personal financial information).
The latest victim is Bethesda, whose official website for Brink was compromised over the weekend. Bethesda states that, once again, no credit card or other financial information was taken, but that some usernames, email addresses, and passwords may have been taken. As if things weren't bad enough when the Sony downtime prevented people from playing Brink online at launch, now this. Sheesh.
The LulzSec Twitter account, somewhere in between bouts of self-congratulation and complaints about their personal YouTube video stream speeds, states that they might not release any of the personal user info, but will definitely release some of the other company data extracted from Bethesda's servers.
No one seems entirely sure what, exactly, it is that has inspired LulzSec to go after company page after company page, but if the idea is to craft some kind of elaborate piece of hacking-based performance art comedy on the absurdly low security standards employed by publishers, for serious guys, we get it. I know it worked for Urkel for a while, but doing the same gag over and over and over again doesn't somehow make it more funny over time. After a while, it just starts to sound like insanity.
