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Codemasters, Epic Games and the International Monetary Fund get hacked as hackers get a busy summer

June 14th, 2011        

Codemasters, Epic Games and the International Monetary Fund Get Hacked

It’s been a big weekend for hackers. Over the last month or so, Sony has been bombarded with attacks from hackers. However, Sony is not the only one under attack. Nintendo and the UK’s National Health Service have also gotten some attention as of late, though the breaches weren’t quite as damaging as the one that saw Sony lose the personal data of 77 million users. Over the last few days, Codemasters, Epic and the International Monetary Fund were added to the list of companies targeted by hackers.

Codemasters

UK game developer Codemasters has admitted that the personal details of its tens of thousands of users have been stolen and names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, Xbox gamer tags, dates of birth and biographies were among the compromised data. Similar to Sony, payment details were not compromised in the Codemasters breach, which occurred on June 3. Codemasters advised users to change their account passwords and said those who use the same login details and passwords for other sites or services should change their passwords there too. The company’s website, codemasters.com, will remain offline for the foreseeable future. According to the BBC, Codemasters does not know who is responsible for the attack.

Read more about the breach here.

The International Monetary Fund

The International Monetary Fund was also targeted in an attack that is now believed to be backed by a foreign government. Responsible for managing financial crises around the world, 187 of the world’s 194 nations are members of the IMF.

The New York Times first reported news of the attack on Saturday and cited “several senior officials with knowledge of the attack” that say it was both sophisticated and serious. The IMF possesses a significant amount of sensitive data about countries it provided economic relief to (such as Ireland and Greece), but the Times reports that it also has “potentially market-moving information” on countries that may be the brink of economic crisis. The attack is said to have occurred over several months and though it’s not yet known who is responsible, Bloomberg reports that it is now believed to have been backed by government funding. The government behind the attack is not known.A large amount of data is said to have been stolen.

Read more about the breach here.

Epic Games

Rounding out this weekend’s hat-trick of hacks is Epic Games. The company confirmed on Friday that its websites and forums were recently hacked. A message from CEO Tim Sweeney posted to the official Epic Games forums admits that hackers “likely obtained the email addresses and encrypted passwords of forum users” but plain text passwords weren’t revealed and none of Epic Games’ websites store credit card data or other sensitive information. Epic recommends all users log into their vBulletin accounts and change their passwords. Of course, the sound advice here is that if you use the same login anywhere else, you should probably change those passwords, too.

Read more about the breach here.

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