Hacked Sega finds unlikely friend in Sony hacker LulzSec

Japanese video game developer Sega, which was hacked earlier this week, has found an unlikely friend in hacking group LulzSec, which has offered to help it destroy the people who attacked its network.

Sega Corp joined the ranks of growing number of video game companies whose computer network were hacked into in the past few months, by announcing Friday that its Pass network was breached and some personal information about an unspecified number of Sega Pass online network members were compromised in the attack.

Sega said customer email addresses and birthdates as well as encrypted or scrambled passwords that were stored in the database were stolen.

We immediately took the appropriate action to protect our consumers’ data and isolate the location of the breach, the company said in an email sent out to Sega Pass users.

Sega sought to alleviate the concerns of Pass users by saying their credit card information was safe. Please note that no personal payment information was stored by Sega, as we use external payment providers, meaning your payment details were not at risk from this intrusion, it said.

The Pass network went offline on Thursday, the day when Sega learnt of the breach and it is not known when it will go online. The company said it is investigating the breach and the network was going through some improvements.

Sega said it has reset all the passwords and all access to SEGA Pass has been temporarily suspended.

The video game developer, which is a division of Japan's Sega Sammy Holdings, the maker of slot machines and popular video games like Sonic the Hedgehog, was one of the biggest video game console makers in the 1990s but its Dreamcast system failed to compete with Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo Wii, prompting Sega to quickly pull it off the market in 2001.

Soon after the hack, Sega, which currently focuses on developing video game titles for other gaming consoles a such as Microsoft's XBox 360, found an unlikely friend in Lulz Security (or LulzSec), a loose group of hackers, which offered to help the company find its attackers and destroy them.

LulzSec expressed its deep love for Dreamcast and said those who attacked Sega are going down.

@Sega - contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down, LulzSec, which has claimed credit for recent attacks on Sony, Nintendo, Bethesda, The Escapist, PBS, Fox.com, the US Senate, the CIA, and a slew of gaming sites including EVE Online, Minecraft and League of Legends, tweeted.

LulzSec has not confirmed whether it has hacked into the computer network systems of Lockheed Martin, the FBI, and Codemasters, which were also breached recently. The hacking group had recently opened a hotline so its fans can suggest potential targets.

It is not known whether Anonymous, another hackers' group, was behind Sega's hack. Earlier this week, reports circulated in the media that LulzSec and Anonymous had locked horns and wanted to attack each other.

However, LulzSec was quick to dismiss the reports. #MediaFacts Saying we’re attacking Anonymous because we taunted /b/ is like saying we’re going to war with America because we stomped on a cheeseburger,” it tweeted.

We are NOT at war with @LulzSec #MediaFags, Anonymous responded.