The Japanese games' publisher Koei Tecmo was targeted by hackers who compromised the company's English language website and stole confidential data belonging to over 65,000 users. Following the attack, Koei Tecmo announced that they have temporarily shut down their US and European website as a precautionary measure.
The hackers targeted the company’s website to obtain confidential information about the user accounts like names, encrypted passwords, and email addresses, however, the hackers were not successful in their attempt to acquire the data related to 'user payment details'.
The Japanese publisher announced in the press release that “Within the website operated by KTE, the ‘Forum’ page and the registered user information (approximately 65,000 entries) has been determined to the data that may have been breached. The user data that may have been leaked through hacking is perceived to be the (optional) account names and related password (encrypted) and/or registered email address.”
In the press release, the publisher further stated that users do not need to worry about personal financial information because they do not store this confidential information about the users.
Referencing the reports of Bleeping Computer, the hacker has leaked critical information about users' accounts for free on a hacker forum like IP addresses, email addresses, and passwords.
Founded in 2009, following the merger of 'Koie' and 'Teo', Koei Tecmo is a Japanese video game and anime holding organization that is responsible for many popular PC and console games like Hyrule Warriors; Age Of Calamity, Dead or Alive, Nioh 2, Atelier Ryza, to name a few.
The attackers assert that they have used a spear-phishing campaign to hack the koeitecmoeurope.com website on December 18th. The operators behind the attack also claimed that they were deliberating to sell a forum database for 0.05 bitcoins or about 1,300 dollars on a hacking marketplace.
As per the reports by Bleeping Computer, stating their malevolent motives, the hackers told that they have “leaked the data to punish the Koei Tecmo publisher because they were not following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines and they were refusing to spend the money on encrypting the users' information and were using a fragile salted MD5 hashing algorithm from 1992 and further warned them if they do not use the strong encryption techniques, we will continue to attack them”.