Or Not
March 21st, 2007
It appears that reports of a systemic hack of Bungie.net to obtain a slew of Xbox Live accounts may be blown out of proportion.Microsoft sent their official response to this morning’s story to me just a bit ago:
Microsoft Responds to Live Hack Concerns - Kotaku
Blogged with Flock
I wouldn’t say it’s blown out of proportion. According to shacknews: this might closely tied to Bungie.net, and somewhat out of Microsoft’s control. It also seems that Malicious users are private messaging unsuspecting players telling them they’ve won something, and asking for Microsoft Points to “process the prize”. Great stuff going on right now.
Between this, and the Constant stream of /tells in WoW from gold farmers, part of me is beginning to regret that games have become so mainstream. :’/
Of course, most of me doesn’t.
Comment by Della Bitta — March 22, 2007 @ 10:06 am
It keeps getting stranger:
“Earlier this week when I first heard about the “Xbox Live network hacked” story, I checked with the people on our end, and then posted about it. As originally posted, Xbox Live has not been hacked. That is still true. A security researcher, Kevin Finisterre, discovered not a hack, but the fact that some accounts may have been compromised as a result of ’social engineering’, also known as ‘pre-texting’, through our support center. Kevin gave me a call directly and once I realized what he was talking about (he sent me some painful-to-listen-to audio files) I confirmed that the team is fully aware of this issue. They are examining the policies, and have already begun re-training the support staff and partners to help make sure we reduce this type of social engineering attack.
There’s no other way to say it; this situation shouldn’t have happened. Our customers deserve better.
The Xbox team takes what happened and the resolution of it very seriously. I also wanted to let you know that we’ve posted a page on Xbox.com ‘Troubleshooting Access to your Xbox Live Account’ that can help you if you have questions. Finally, I chatted with Kevin earlier today and thanked him for bringing this issue to our attention. I also let him know that we have a much better understanding of this issue and that we are reviewing the processes in place to help prevent this in the future.”
from Majornelson.com
http://www.majornelson.com/archive/2007/03/23/xbox-live-security-update.aspx
Comment by Chris — March 27, 2007 @ 11:04 am