2.5million PlayStation And Xbox Forum Accounts Breached

Microsoft and Sony gamer accounts hacked via ISO forums.

Data breaches and hacking events are a record-setting, multi-billion-dollar annual headache for companies of every size and industry. In fact, the Identity Theft Resource Center has only discovered one year in the past ten or so in which the number of data breaches didn’t set a new record. With so many breaches and the resulting compromised consumer records, some sources have theorized that there isn’t a consumer alive whose data isn’t floating around “out there.”

A simple gaming forum hack could lead criminals to your email account then your online banking accounts.

Over the past decade or more, we moved away from a mindset of hacking for the sake of proving one’s tech skills to a more focused purpose for data breaches. But that still doesn’t mean that “non-viable” targets are safe from data breaches. Case in point: two gaming forums were breached last week and over 2.5 million user account login credentials accessed. Both the Xbox360 ISO and PSP ISO forums were hacked, giving thieves access to email addresses, usernames, passwords, and other more sensitive account information.

What can they do with this data? Short of logging into the forum and complaining about a new feature, you might make the mistake of thinking this sort of information won’t net any real benefit to the hackers. Unfortunately, the rampant plague of reusing the same weak password on all your online accounts means a simple gaming forum could lead criminals to your email account, which could then lead them to your retail shopping and online banking accounts.

While stealing your forum credentials might seem like slow news day stuff, it’s got a bigger takeaway. Stop it with the weak passwords already, and stop reusing them. Most of all, stop treating the minor websites that don’t seem to gather highly sensitive information as data leak playgrounds; remember, every site that takes so much as an email address has another piece of your identity puzzle, and with enough data breaches, your complete profile can be put together.

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