MapleStory breached, 13 million accounts exposed

The famously hacked Sony has a sympathetic shoulder this week, as Nexon recently discovered a massive breach that's exposed over 13 million MapleStory player accounts to cyber ne'er-do-wells. Discovered this past Thursday, the breach was solely limited to South Korea, as Nexon hosts separate countries on their own servers.

This means that any South Korean MapleStory player's information is at risk, including user IDs, names, passwords, and residential registration numbers. This information could potentially be stolen and used for a variety of crimes.

While there's been no word whether actual personal information has been stolen, Nexon nevertheless urged these 13+ million subscribers to change their passwords. The company has contacted the police to ask for a formal investigation.

This comes at an unfortunate time for the company, as Nexon is poised to present its IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December.

Reader Comments (13)

Ya know, I'm sure there are plenty of adults that play Maple Story, but taking the time to hack a game that's primarily aimed at kids is just.....tasteless. Some people just have no shame.

@Tristik

Technically, this also means Combat Arms, DFO, etc are all hacked as well. This might actually be good news, as waves of hacked accounts have been reported on the forums, but Nexon has been refusing to do anything about it. Now apparently that exploit those lazy people have left up is now being used, and they have only themselves to blame.

I almost returned to the American version of DNF myself, what with the release of Male Fighters. This just shows that I was right to pull away from them. No matter how truly great the game was, if it's run by arseholes, then it's only a matter of time until the stinking shart piling up overwhelms.

@Tristik Most of those kids use their parents' personal information and credit card number just to gain access to the game, so that information base became the target. The "kid" part never entered the equation in the first place.

I tried this title one time. Do they mean 13 million registered? Over multiple titles for Nexon? I fail to see 13 million live subscriptions for this one title, i do see spin to hype the ipo for sale, that makes more sense.

@Graill440 It used to be the most popular f2p game, not sure about now but yeah don't be surprised.

@Graill440

In this case I'd say it doesn't matter whether or not these are "live" subscriptions, because your user information is user information whether you're paying or not. If you're using any of that information anywhere else (similar user ID, similar password, etc.) then everything else is compromised as well.

@Graill440 It doesn't say active or subscribed accounts so it's just database of played and left for dead accounts who no longer play. If Blizzard had WoW hacked and gave away all their accounts it would probably be close to 20mil. I've had a total of 3 WoW accounts and 2 are inactive as I merely used them for Refer a friend.

@Graill440 I'm fairly sure MapleStory is not a sub game, it is a cash shop game. Yes it is only for one game, not multiple games. It's also true that WoW has something like 10 mil active subscriptions, but both MS and Runescape has more active players overall. I'm defining active here as logging in more than once a week.

@Graill440

Maple Story is f2p, but it's the father game that really started the cashshop popularity if not the very business model. While I can't say about other f2p mmos in korea already doing that they certainty introduced it to the west.

@Graill440
Just because WoW keeps overhyping their sub numbers every now and then we cant understand a simple unrelated statement anymore just because it contains the word "accounts"? People read too much WoW into everything and became too much affected by the PR conditioning of Blizzard...

Account information of their playeraccounts got stolen...
The just stated how many. Thats it.
-There nothing about hype or PR to this statement. Its about stolen account information and scale of damages suffered, hows that going to promote anything?
-WoWs subscribernumber hype is completely irrelevant to this statement.
-Its completely irrelevant whether its a P2P game or F2P
-Its completely irrelevant whether its the accounts are active by P2P standards or not.

Lost accounting information is simply just that,
nothing about typical Blizzard hype

Just watch, hackers are going to push the internet into some sort of security crazy lock down.
Then we'll all know our goofy names and our total browsing habits, not just what we'll cop to.

Hackers.... The only ones I have ANY respect for are the ones who work to stop these mentally ill ones who just like to cause trouble or work for criminal organizations. No matter how good you are at causing chaos, you will still be a loser when you wake up in the morning.

They where after the KSSNs

MapleStory breached, 13 million accounts exposed

Reader Comments (13)

Posted: Nov 26th 2011 6:32PM Tristik said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 2:48PM ShivanSwordsman said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 7:41PM DeftCrow said

Posted: Nov 26th 2011 6:41PM Graill440 said

Posted: Nov 26th 2011 6:54PM Braiks said

Posted: Nov 26th 2011 6:54PM Randomessa said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 4:43AM Alex Oglitchkin said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 6:22AM wahahabuh said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 11:59AM Amlin said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 3:42PM Sukiyaki said

Posted: Nov 26th 2011 8:29PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 3:02AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Nov 27th 2011 6:03AM Viiral said

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