Business & Economy

Nintendo reports 140,000 additional accounts hacked

Tokyo, June 10 (efe-epa).- Video game company Nintendo has said that the number of accounts breached during a recent hack of its Nintendo Network ID (NNID) is around 300,000, almost double the number originally reported.

In April, the Kyoto-based company revealed that unauthorized access had been made of some 160,000 NNID accounts, which led to, among other things, some users getting unauthorized charges for purchases in the company’s online stores, My Nintendo Store and Nintendo eShop.

According to reports, unauthorized purchases were first discovered in March, and in April, before the announcement of the breach, Nintendo advised in a tweet that users should enable two-factor authentication on their accounts.

Late Tuesday the company issued a statement saying that the data breach was more serious than first reported.

Around 140,000 more accounts were believed to have been breached, Nintendo said in the statement.

The company said that fewer than 1 percent of all NNIDs had been breached and that it was in the process of reimbursing users in each country for any unauthorized purchases, adding that reimbursements had already been made to most customers.

The Japanese company locked the hacked accounts and asked potentially affected users to reset their account password via a prompt sent by the company.

The NNID is a unique identifier made up of between six and 16 characters that allows access to certain Nintendo Network services, including Miiverse and Nintendo sShop on Wii U and Nintendo 3DS family systems.

These accounts include information such as name, date of birth, gender, country and region, and email address.

Although NNIDs do not store banking information, accessing an NNID linked to a Nintendo account illegally can give access to that account and all options available to it, such as purchases through the Nintendo eShop.

After the incident, the Japanese company disabled the option to log in to Nintendo accounts using the NNID.

Until Mar. 31, the end of the Japanese fiscal year, Nintendo had sold 75.77 million units of its Nintendo 3DS handheld console, 55.77 million Switch game consoles and 13.56 million of its Wii U console. EFE-EPA

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