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A Case Of Hacker Extortion
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-12-20
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The hackers hit another company. This time the company was well-known role-playing game company White Wolf Publishing. While they don't suspect any credit card numbers were stolen, the hackers did say they would post the account information they received on the Internet unless paid.
The company received the email on Dec. 11th and promptly went to the FBI. The hackers said they would post the stolen usernames and passwords to the Internet if White Wolf didn't cough up an undisclosed amount of money. White Wolf refused and went to the FBI. When the company refused, the hackers began sending out emails to customers of the gaming company they could buy the stolen information for $10. Here's the letter the company posted on their website:
Like many other well-known companies of the last few years, White Wolf was the target of an attack by international hackers on Sunday December 11th. These hackers are attempting to extort money from us with the threat of posting user data to the internet. We have no intention of paying this money, and are in contact with the FBI in an attempt to bring these criminals to justice.
We are choosing to make this public so that our users and fans can take any precautions needed to protect themselves. We are recommending that if you have used your White Wolf user password as the password for any other services you use on the internet, that you change them immediately.
These hackers were able to exploit a flaw in our software and access user data, this data included usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords. As far as we can ascertain, they were unable to access any credit card data (nor have they claimed they did). However, it is possible for the encrypted passwords they accessed to be decrypted given enough time.
We appreciate your patience and concern while we work through the details of this process.
In addition to this posting we will have mailed our userbase to inform them of this incident. For correspondence regarding this, please direct all queries to wwaccounts@white-wolf.com .
In order to secure the site, we have reset all users' passwords. To get your new password, please click on the "Forgotten your account password?" link on the Login page, enter the email address with which you use to log in to this site, and click Submit. Your new password will then be sent to that email, and you can use it to log on to the website once more. After that, you can reset your password to whatever you want. However, we recommend that you do not set your password to what it used to be.
We thank you for your patience in this matter, and apologize for any inconvenience.
Sincerely,
The White Wolf Web Team
White Wolf, known for games like "Vampire: The Requiem" and their previously published "World of Darkness" fell victim to these hackers. But this isn't the first time they've had problems. Some may remember the Vampire game from a case a few years ago. College students in Murray, Kentucky were players of one of White Wolf's games, a previous edition of Vampire. They took the game a little too seriously and ended up committing murder.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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