More than 35,000 gamers hacked

The popular Japanese video game company is warning that thousands of users may have had their information stolen.

Like a Nintendo intrusion disclosed earlier in the week, the Konami attack stemmed from a series of “brute force” password-cracking attempts.

From June 13 to July 7 attackers used stolen usernames and passwords and tried to log into Konami ID, a portal the company runs for gamers, 3,945,927 times. They managed to succeed 35,252 times. Eventually a large number of access errors were detected on Monday, July 8, leading Konami to look into the issue.

Also similar to the Nintendo incident, the stolen usernames and passwords appear to have been leaked from an external service provider, “prompting curiosity as to whether it was the same third party provider that leaked Nintendo’s customer information.”

Konami ID users’ names, addresses, date of birth, telephone numbers and email addresses may have been exposed. It’s unclear if any financial information was taken but the company claims it hasn’t noticed any changes to users’ personal information or spotted any of the affected accounts trying to use the site’s paid services yet.

“It was only on [July 8] that we learned that 25,000 of Nintendo’s Club Nintendo users had their names and passwords compromised last month as well. Hackers were able to force over 15 million brute force login attempts to glean information from an unnamed third party service associated with the company’s fan site,” Kaspersky researchers reported.