When Will the Hacking End?

Lulsec is climbing your Windows and snatching your data up. Following the much-publicized Sony PlayStation Network debacle in April, hackers attacked Codemasters last week and Epic Games was breach yesterday. In a non-gaming-related incident, Citibank announced last week that the credit card information of 210,000 customers has been compromised since early May. Bethesda is the latest victim of cyber security intrusions, and from the looks of it, they won’t be the last.

Lulzsec, who is also responsible for a recent US Senate internal data leak as well as compromising the user database of Pron.com, claims that they raided Bethesda’s servers but left the stolen credentials of over 200,000 Brink users unexposed because they “actually like this company and would like for them to speed up the production of Skyrim.”

What Lulzsec has apparently uploaded, however, is source code information on Brink servers. As they claim that the hack occurred “some weeks ago,” it’s possible that the stolen server data is no longer relevant. However, that’s beside the point. What is important to note is that once again we have an incidence where the security measures of a company were bypassed, and the time the company took to inform its customers was great.

Many argue that the rampant hacking has one good repercussion in that companies are now becoming that much more aware of and involved in data security. But at the cost of much anxiety, inconvenience, and the possibility of real theft, is it worth allowing hackerseven seemingly benign ones such as Lulzsecto keep sending these messages?