Nintendo Confirms 160,000 Accounts Were Breached

Following a number of recent rumors, it was alleged that Nintendo had suffered a significant security breach which had revealed the details of many users’ accounts. Well, in a report via Eurogamer, Nintendo has now confirmed this by stating that up to 160,000 user details may have been compromised.

To somewhat muddy the waters, however, Nintendo doesn’t believe that the leak came from their own servers or databases. This would, therefore, suggest that the data may have come from a yet unknown third-party.

Nintendo Confirms Data Breach – But it Didn’t Come From Them!

While the exact source of the breach is not yet known (or, at least, hasn’t been disclosed) it is known that the information stolen did include a lot of personal user information. The only silver lining is that Nintendo has said that it does not believe that card information was taken.

What they are, however, strongly suggesting is that all users immediately apply two-tier security to their accounts. The rather lengthy statement from Nintendo reads:

We would like to provide an update on the recent incidents of unauthorised access to some Nintendo Accounts.

While we continue to investigate, we would like to reassure users that there is currently no evidence pointing towards a breach of Nintendo’s databases, servers or services. As one action in our ongoing investigation, we are discontinuing the ability to use a Nintendo Network ID to sign in to a Nintendo Account. All other options to sign-in to a Nintendo Account remain available.

As a further precaution, we will soon contact users about resetting passwords for Nintendo Network IDs and Nintendo Accounts that we have reason to believe were accessed without authorisation.

In addition, we also continue to strongly encourage users to enable two-step verification for their Nintendo Account as instructed here: How to set-up two-step verification for a Nintendo Account.

If any users become aware of unauthorised activity, we encourage them to take the steps outlined in the article about the Nintendo Account recovery process.

During the investigation, in order to deter further attempts of unauthorised sign-ins, we will not reveal more information about the methods employed to gain unauthorised access.

We apologise for the inconvenience and concerns caused to our customers, and we will continue working hard to safeguard the security of our users’ data.

What Do We Think?

In the grand scheme of things, while 160,000 accounts may sound like a lot, it’s only a relatively small pool of their overall users. That being said, however, we’d agree with Nintendo that applying the two-tier authentication would be a very wise move!

As for whether your specific account was breached, it’s unclear if Nintendo will be in touch to notify those particular users. For the time being, however, it seems prudent to up your security. It is, after all, better to be safe than sorry!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!