Nintendo’s U.S. servers get a light hack attack

Nintendo acknowledged today that hackers broke into one of the servers for its U.S. business, but the company said there was no loss of sensitive company or user data.

The hacker group Lulzsec, which recently defaced PBS and Sony web sites, said that it broke into a Nintendo server and it was not systematically attacking the company. But the danger of the break-in was nowhere near as serious as the hack attack that took down Sony’s 77-million member PlayStation Network for a month.

“The server contained no consumer information. The protection of our customer information is our utmost priority,” said Nintendo of America, the U.S. branch of Nintendo, in an e-mailed statement to Reuters. “We constantly monitor our security.”

Lulzsec posted the results of its Nintendo attack, but the data wasn’t useful from its point of view. It said, “we sincerely hope Nintendo plugs the gap.”

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.