Topic: Nintendo hacker arrested

Police in Spain have arrested a man who allegedly stole details on thousands of Nintendo users and tried to blackmail the company.

The unnamed individual obtained data on 4,000 gamers, according to Spain's Interior Ministry.

It is claimed he threatened to contact the country's data protection agency, accusing the firm of negligence.

When Nintendo did not respond, he began leaking some of the information online, said police.

The man was arrested in the southern province of Malaga.

Authorities say he had been planning to release the full contents of the user database onto the internet.

It is unclear if the alleged theft was from Nintendo's own computer system or that of a third party.

Nintendo said it was unable to comment on the case as is was the subject of of an active investigation by the Spanish authorities.

taken from BBC news website

Wow.

Pretty cool. I hope I wasn't one of the 4000 though.

lol, same here.

Wait, info on 4000 gamers? What info does Nintendo have?

Me either.

Credit Card info for WiiWare/VC Downloads I'm sure.

I have never used a credit card I just buy a points card at a store to be safe.

And hackers suck...

Good!! He and anyone else who commits crimes against Nintendo should be thrown away for life! Pure scum.....

calm your pants down b boy, he'll have to answer for the crime but its not worthy of being thrown away for life

You realise that's incredibly insulting to anyone who's fallen victim to actual 'pure scum', right? Nicking data off Nintendo is hardly genocide.

Does Nintendo actually process their own credit card billing, though? It's usually farmed out to another party that specializes in billing and only billing, for precisely this reason. Nintendo should never even see your credit card number, let alone store it.

Yeah, same here.

@Raylax: Sorry, didn't mean to be insensitive....I just get really sick of a lot of crime having to do with the game industry going un-punished often. Just nice to see someone get slammed on it for once...Also, why Nintendo? Surely there are bigger companies like Microsoft or something. Did this guy have something against Nintendo?

There's overreacting, and then there's this statement. D:

Seriously, if you've ever used your credit card online, anywhere, there is about a 95% chance it has been stolen. That is perhaps being conservative. If you go to the right places, you can buy a bulk of 100 credit card numbers that have been stolen for ~$50. I can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was no more than $1.00 per number. And that is because these groups have literally millions. With millions, it doesn't matter how much they're actually worth, you just want to get rid of them. Sometimes they can get a packet sniffer on unsecured lines between transfers and such, or they get into a server. It isn't real hard in most cases. Quite scary.

So, yeah, don`t worry about it! One of those numbers actually being used and your is like winning the lottery; except, you know, bad...

Usually if they are stolen online then either the workstation or the server are compromised with a virus. as long as the work station is clean you are normally safe. the connection is normally protected with encryption.

As far as buying credit card number, that would be pointless. you would have a difficult time using them. If a person checks their statement and sees an improper charge there are usually enough paper trails to find out who did it.

And this is why I don't use credit cards for gaming.

There are people who have schemed their way to over a billion dollars and haven't been sentenced to life. _{(Okay, maybe Madoff got sentenced for 150 years and not many people can live that long but whatever)}

@Chicken.... It was just a guess, but I don't see what else a hacker would be looking for if he claim information on 4000 people. I'm sure how long we played Galaxy 2 doesn't really matter.