Nintendo acknowledged that 160,000 Switch accounts were hacked

During the past week, rumors of an extremely large number of Nintendo Switch user accounts being hacked in April became a topic of great interest in many gaming forums and security around the world.

Today, Nintendo has officially admitted this sad rumor. Specifically, 'about 160,000 Nintendo Switch user accounts have been hijacked by hackers in the past few weeks. This allows fraudsters to make illegal purchases without the account owner 'knowledge.'

This information has been acknowledged by Nintendo on its Japanese-language support website. It was also revealed that the Switch user credentials were illegally hacked by 'some other means outside of Nintendo's service'. According to preliminary assessment from Nintendo security team, it is likely that hackers hacked the information of Switch users by impersonating Nintendo Network ID, old login credentials used on Wii U and 3DS. The crook was then able to access the victim's account - used on Switch and Nintendo's mobile games - through their associated NNIDs.

Thus, hackers will be able to gain access to personal information about account holders such as name, date of birth, gender, country and email address - elements that can be listed for sale on dark web forums. or used as 'material' for later phishing attacks. According to the initial identification, this infringing campaign was the most expensive to deploy since early April.

The temporary countermeasure taken by Nintendo was to disable the ability to log into a Nintendo account via NNID, and to send an email to suggest accounts that may have been compromised to reset the password.

Notice from Nintendo

Nintendo recommends that the Switch account holder reset the password the next time they log in, as well as set different passwords for their NNID and Nintendo accounts and contact the support team immediately if they find any. Any suspicious trading activity related to your account. In addition, activating two-factor authentication on the Switch will also significantly reduce the possibility of account breach in the future.