A new video supposedly from the hacking group Anonymous warns Sony that they are soon to be targeted for their support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Trion Worlds, makers of the MMO Rift Online, has been hacked according to an email it sent out to subscribers last night. The company said in the letter that unknown intruders gained access to a Trio Worlds account database that contained personal user information and credit card data.

According to a new report from F-Secure, over $10 million will be stolen online by cyber criminals this holiday season, because consumers are increasingly turning away from traditional retail to shop at online retailers. Online shopping has increased 10 percent since the same period a year ago, to right around $30.9 billion dollars - so far - according to comScore. For example, Cyber Monday raked in $1.25 billion, and Free Shipping Day saw around $1.72 billion in revenue.

Here we go again.

Square Enix put out a press release this afternoon stating that it had “reason to believe that unknown parties may have gained unauthorized access” to a server related to its Square Enix Members service offered in North America and Japan.  In response, the company temporarily suspended operation of the free service as of last night.

Anti-virus and security software maker Kaspersky is not happy with the Business Software Alliance's early support of SOPA and Protect IP in the U.S. Even though the BSA later walked back its support of SOPA, the Russian firm has had enough. It announced that it plans to leave the BSA over its support for SOPA. Kaspersky has announced that on January 1st 2012 it will withdraw its membership of the BSA.

Watchdog groups and governments in Europe are taking a closer look at Carrier IQ's tracking software, to make sure those mobile phone vendors and operators who use it are not violating users' privacy or the law. The Bavarian State Office for Data Protection recently sent a letter to Apple asking it how it uses Carrier IQ's software.

Ever since Trevor Eckhart uncovered the true nature of Carrier IQ, a program that monitors everything that's going on on a smartphone it is installed on, it has been dominating headlines. Consumers are obviously concerned about their privacy - particularly if they happened to be a customer of a company that used the software like Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile. While the company that makes the software insists the software is not malicious, several parties have decided to sue them for allegedly violating federal wiretap laws.

Account information from more than 13 million MapleStory players was compromised in a recent hacking incident, according to a report in the Korean Herald. According to that report, the attack took place last Thursday on Thanksgiving, and affected three-quarters of the game's player-base - right around 13.2 million people. The data that may have been stolen included player names, user IDs, passwords, and registration numbers (Korea's version of the US's social security number).

After a day or two of speculation, Valve has officially confirmed to the public that the Steam database suffered a security breach earlier this week. Valve Software co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell issued a statement to members letting them know what happened and if there might some concerns about the security of their Steam accounts. The take-away for Steam account holders is that passwords were "hashed and salted" and credit card information was encrypted. Still Newell cautions Steam users to pay attention to their account activity. The full statement is below:

Overclock.net has gathered an avalanche of stories related to how Battlefield 3 and Origin are being received in Germany (thanks to Solarian for tip). The short answer is that Germans seem to hate it because of the company's terms of service and what Origin is doing on people's PCs.

French mobile publisher Gameloft acknowledged on Thursday that a security breach forced it to temporarily take down one of its web sites. Reports began surfacing on the company's forums earlier this week, suggesting that the GameloftLive.com Web site had been experiencing problems and that some accounts had been compromised. After a poster suggested that users stay away from the site and that Gameloft fix the problem, the web site was taken down.

Turbine Entertainment sent out an alert this morning informing subscribers of its various MMO titles that a third-party "may have attempted to access" forum accounts. While the company says that there is no indication that any accounts were modified or compromised, it is urging subscribers to change their passwords for the sake of safety and security. One of the curious things about the email is that it seems to indicate that this happened sometime before October 11. Why Turbine waited this long we do not know. From the email sent out this morning:

GameSpot managed to corner Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley during the GDC Online conference this week in Austin, Texas to get his thoughts on the recent attack that resulted in Sony temporarily locking down around 93,000 PlayStation Network, Sony Entertainment Network, and Sony Online Entertainment accounts.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released new guidelines on Thursday that require publicly traded companies to disclose when they are the victim of a security breach or cyber attack. The new guidelines are the result of members of congress pressuring the watchdog agency to add them following several major cyber attacks earlier this year. Senator John Rockefeller is one of those lawmakers.

Last night Sony's new SVP & Chief Information Security Officer, Philip Reitinger wrote a lengthy post on the official PlayStation Blog, detailing some questionable mass logins. While some of those attempts to login to accounts by unknown persons were successful, Reitinger assures the public that those accounts have been identified by the company and temporarily locked down.

Sony has hired a heavyweight in its ongoing fight to protect its online game services from hackers. The company has hired Philip Reitinger, former director of the U.S. National Cyber Security Center, as its new chief information security officer.

Nokia's community pages have been temporarily closed and replaced with a company statement following a security breach over the weekend. The online community used by developers that make Nokia phone apps has been hacked and the company warned its members that their personal information, including dates of birth and email addresses may have been stolen. For now, the service has been shut down while Nokia investigates. No one has claimed responsibility for the security breach at this time.

At the annual Black Hat hacker convention that happened in Las Vegas this week Sony earned a dubious distinction of the security breach that took several of its services down for nearly two months. The awards are called "Pwnies" and - unless you are a hacker - you don’t want to be "honored" with on. Sony earned the "Most Epic Fail" award for the massive security breach that brought down the PlayStation Network and related services for nearly two months earlier this year.

Later this week in Las Vegas the hacking experts and security researchers will converge on Las Vegas for the annual Black Hat conference, and when they are done discussing hacking techniques and security breaches, they'll hand out awards for the best and worst security called the "Pwnie Awards." Sony is a leading contender for one particular award this year - for obvious reasons.

Late last week hacking group Lulz Security announced that they were all done hacking websites, servers and game services. But before the group said its final bon voyage it committed one more act on Saturday: they released a 500MB torrent file containing all kinds of data stolen from various places. The most notable data from the file is from the beta of Battlefield Heroes. We assume the data is old.

A new lawsuit filed in federal court in San Diego on Monday (Cotorreal et al v. Sony Corporation Inc.) alleges that Sony's security breach of Sony Online Entertainment and PlayStation Network were the direct result of layoffs earlier in the month of April. In late April the company laid off around 205 employees from its MMO company SOE, closing down offices in Denver, Seattle and Tucson. These layoffs also affected the company's Network Operations Centre. The complaint alleges that Sony did not mention that any of these employees were part of "network operations" at the time of the layoffs.

The complaint also alleges that Sony rushed to protect data when it first learned of the security breach - but it wasn't user data they were concerned about. The company paid millions to secure sensitive corporate secrets, not offering the same level of action for customer data, the complaint contends.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that iPad hacker Daniel Spliter has pled guilty to two felony charges - identity theft and conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to computers. The charges stem from a June 2010 security breach of AT&T's servers that ultimately led to the theft and public disclosure of 120,000 AT&T customers’ email addresses on Gawker.com.

As part of his plea deal Spliter admitted to writing code that allowed him to breach AT&T Inc.’s servers and steal user data related to the iPad. The hack was facilitated by a security hole in AT&T's website. By using an exploit related to a SIM card identifier called an ICC-ID, Spliter was able to steal over a hundred thousand emails. At the time of the hack, the 26-year-old San Francisco native said that he was doing this to bring the matter to AT&T's attention. Instead he got the attention of the FBI.

The Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled a hearing on privacy and data security for June 29, but has not revealed the witness list at this time. Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) has held several hearings this year on privacy issues, cybersecurity, and do-not-track legislation. He has also pressed the Federal Trade Commission and App store owners such as Google and Apple to do more about protecting the privacy of children when it comes to mobile apps.

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.

Nintendo has introduced additional security measures to its web sites "to ensure the ongoing safety of visitors," the company announced today. The beefed-up security follows a phishing threat identified on one of its websites earlier this month - as well as a breach in security by hacking group Lulsec. Nintendo said in a statement that its website is now "fully operational" and visitors can now safely log back into their Club Nintendo accounts.

"We have now done a comprehensive scan of the whole website and introduced additional security measures to ensure the ongoing safety of our customers, read a statement from the company. "We would like to reassure customers that their protection is our utmost priority and we take security very seriously. We maintain constant monitoring of our systems in order to identify intrusion attempts and block them."

Hacking group Lulzsec (Lulz Security) targeted and successfully took down Eve-Online, Minecraft, League of Legends and gaming website The Escapist today as part of an operation it called #TitanicTakeoverTuesday. The first to go down was CCP's space MMO Eve-Online. Later in the day the company confirmed that it was having technical difficulties and had to take the service down entirely.

Likewise, The Escapist went down and is still down as of this writing. Mojang's popular indie game also suffered a serious attack, taking down its website and the game's online servers. Finally the group pointed its "Lulz Cannon" at Riot Games' online strategy RPG League of Legends. The target for that attack was the game's login server.

You may recall that late last week Spanish Police arrested three men that they claimed were connected to hacktivist group Anonymous. The police alleged that the trio were responsible for  hacking various web sites associated with Sony, BBVA and Bankia, ENEL, and the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia, and New Zealand.

At the time the group's official Twitter account offered an ominous message to law enforcement: "expect us." And so they came and went. The hackers managed to keep www.policia.es offline for about an hour from 2130 GMT on 12 June.

Zenimax subsidiary Bethesda Softworks confirmed on its blog today that Lulsec or some other hacking group successfully breached security on its web site over the weekend. The company said that "hackers may have gained access to some user names, email addresses, and/or passwords." The hacking group that has targeted various web sites including Nintendo's and many others this month, promised they would attack the developer behind such franchises as the Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3.

They are instructing users to change their passwords immediately as a precautionary measure.

The company did say that "no personal financial information or credit card data was obtained."

Full statement below:

According to a New York Times report, Spanish police have arrested three men they claim were involved in hacking Sony's PlayStation Network and the PlayStation Store. Police also claim that the trio are part of the hacktivist group Anonymous. The three men were released on their own recognizance pending formal charges but are expected to be charged with "forming an illegal association to attack public and corporate Web sites," which carries a maximum sentence of up to three years.

The official Twitter feed for the hacktivist group does provide some confirmation that the three are somehow connected to the group:

Codemasters is alerting customers that its servers were breached by unknown hackers on June 3 and personal information of its users may have been stolen. According to the email, several areas of its web site that were compromised include codemasters.com, the Codemasters corporate website and sub-domains, the DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page, and the Codemasters EStore.

Data that may have been compromised from the EStore includes customer names and addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted passwords and order history. Payment details were not at risk from this section of the site because Codemasters uses an external site for payment transactions.

Data taken from the Codemasters CodeM database includes members' names, usernames, screen names, email addresses, date of birth, encrypted passwords, newsletter preferences, any biographies entered by users, details of last site activity, IP addresses and Xbox Live Gamertags.