After Sega gets hacked, LulzSec offers to seek revenge - CNET

The hacking free-for-all continued this week as Sega apparently became the latest victim of a network breach and none other than hacking group LulzSec offered to help the game company by taking down the responsible parties.

The blog PlayStation LifeStyle posted yesterday what it said was a letter sent by Sega to users of its Sega Pass service, informing them that "unauthorized entry was gained" to the Sega Pass database and that the company is investigating.

"We have identified that a subset of Sega Pass members' e-mails addresses, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords were obtained," the letter reads. "To stress, none of the passwords obtained were stored in plain text. Please note that no personal payment information was stored by Sega, as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion."

The hack would be the latest in a recent explosion of such activity, which has skewered the likes of entertainment giant Sony, defense contractor Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Senate, and the FBI, among others.

The letter doesn't say who might be behind the intrusion; it simply continues with news on how Sega is responding to the hack, along with a couple of cautions:

If you use the same login information for other websites and/or services as you do for SEGA Pass, you should change that information immediately.

We have also reset your password and all access to SEGA Pass has been temporarily suspended.

Additionally we recommend you please take extra caution if you should receive suspicious e-mails that ask for personal or sensitive information.

As of this writing the Sega Pass service is in fact offline, but a notice says only that the service "is going through some improvements so is currently unavailable for new members to join or existing members to modify their details including resetting passwords." It also says Sega hopes to have Sega Pass "back up and running very soon."

Also yesterday, LulzSec, which has hacked Sony, Nintendo, and FBI affiliate Infragard Atlanta, among others, sent out a public tweet addressed to Sega: "@Sega - contact us," the tweet reads. "We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down."

Underscoring the current out-of-control atmosphere surrounding cybersecurity, LulzSec followed that tweet not long after with a note updating the phone numbers of the request-a-hack hotlines the group had set up earlier in the week.