Nintendo says 300,000 accounts were breached by hackers

Japanese gaming tycoon Nintendo confirmed that 300,000 accounts have been breached by hackers since early April. The figure is nearly double that of 160,000 accounts that were previously reported but has since been updated as of June 9.

Hackers managed to gain access to personal information such as email addresses, date of birth, email addresses, gender, and country/region but failed to retrieve credit card details. Nintendo discovered the additional 140,000 accounts that were hacked after continuing their investigation after the first breach.

Hackers breached Nintendo’s Network IDs, which were intended for services on the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, and then migrated to Nintendo accounts, which could be used to make purchases on the company’s official digital store.

The company claimed that only a small fraction of the accounts breached were used to make fraudulent purchases. However, the company is taking additional security measures to avoid such breaches. Nintendo has managed to refund nearly all the customers who fell victim to fraudulent purchases.

A statement on Nintendo’s official Japanese website read; “Less than 1% of all NNIDs around the world that may have been illegally logged in may have actually been fraudulently traded through their Nintendo account. We are still in the process of refunding in each country, but we have already finished refunding for most customers.”

Nintendo says that accounts may have been breached if users had similar passwords on both their NNID and Nintendo accounts. In response to the breach, Nintendo prevented Switch owners from logging into their Nintendo accounts via NNID. The company will send password resets via email to all 300,000 accounts that were impacted. Additionally, Nintendo also encouraged all Switcher owners to enable two-step verification to keep their accounts secure.