According to a letter posted by our very own E. Zachary Knight at his personal website ezknight.net, Sega has been hacked, and the scope and scale of the security breach seems to be grand in nature. According to the email from Sega, the company was forced to take down its "Sega Pass System" yesterday after it identified that an "unauthorized entry" had occurred with the system's user database.
A "subset" of SEGA Pass members' emails addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were stolen during that intrusion, says Sega. Thankfully, no credit card or other personal financial information was stolen, and Sega stressed that the stolen data was encrypted and not in "plain text" format.
The usual warnings come with the email: change your password and watch out for any suspicious emails that might ask you to divulge further information. As a rule companies do not ask users to provide personal information within emails.
The full letter can be found below:
Dear XXXX,
As you may be aware, the SEGA Pass system has been offline since yesterday, Thursday 16 June.
Over the last 24 hours we have identified that unauthorised entry was gained to our SEGA Pass database.
We immediately took the appropriate action to protect our consumers’ data and isolate the location of the breach. We have launched an investigation into the extent of the breach of our public systems.
We have identified that a subset of SEGA Pass members emails addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were obtained. To stress, none of the passwords obtained were stored in plain text.
Please note that no personal payment information was stored by SEGA as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.
If you use the same login information for other websites and/ or services as you do for SEGA Pass, you should change that information immediately.
We have also reset your password and all access to SEGA Pass has been temporarily suspended.
Additionally we recommend you please take extra caution if you should receive suspicious emails that ask for personal or sensitive information.
Therefore please do not attempt to login to SEGA Pass at present, we will communicate when the service becomes available.
We sincerely apologise for this incident and regret any inconvenience caused.
We are contacting all our members with these recommendations.
If you have any further questions please contact SEGA customer support on: mailto:csescalations@sega.com
Thanks to E. Zachary Knight and Andrew Eisen for the tips.
