Look At You, Hackers: The Deus Ex Data Theft
Oh dear. Internet rotters have done it again, this time turning their attentions to the official website for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and for developer Eidos Montreal. But their hacking is not yer common-or-garden Denial of Service attack or painting pink moustaches on pictures of Adam Jensen - it's stealing the personal data of some 80,000 registered users. Thanks so much, hackers.
The sites were also temporarily defaced to display the above message of willy-waving, reports KrebsOnSecurity, but everything's superficially back to normal now. Reportedly, the damage was done by a subset of the infamous Anonymous hacker collective, who some believe were responsible for the increasingly ludicrous PSN outage/security terror (though they themselves claim they weren't).
Clearly, if you used any login info for the DX3 or Eidos sites that you use for any other services, you should go sort out some new passwords and whatnot now, to be sure some cracker doesn't start reading your Gmail or ordering the most expensive onions on Amazon Groceries. The exact scale of the problem and consequences are not entirely known as yet, as Eidos/Square is keeping shtum. It could have been a whole lot worse, however, if these chatroom logs (again, via KrebsOnSecurity) from the group who may have been responsible suggest:
[16:07]
one thing that would be funny
[16:07]i write a nasty virus
[16:07]that will bsod on startup
[16:07]fuck up all your drivers
[16:07]delete tons of files
[16:07]forkbom on start
[16:07]etc
[16:08]we put that in an exploit kit
[16:08]on the main page
[16:08]there security will be responsible
[16:08]for like
[16:08]thousands of fucked up computers
[16:08]and it would make the news
"One thing that would be funny." Yes, wouldn't it. Good grief.
Why these chaps did what they did isn't entirely understood either - it could have been simply for the lols, but the chatroom logs bear some mention of 'src', which could be either in reference to the website's source code or to the game's source code. Sounds to me like their main interest was simply in sowing havoc, though.