Nintendo confirms that 160,000 user accounts have been illegally compromised

Earlier, many Nintendo players reported that their accounts had logged in multiple times in different places. After media reports, Nintendo also issued a statement saying that the issue was investigated.

At present, Nintendo has issued an official announcement. In the announcement, Nintendo confirmed that about 160,000 Nintendo player accounts have illegally logged.

At the same time, the company also denied that the server was hacked and the account password was leaked. Nintendo said that the player disclosed the account password elsewhere.

Image: Nintendo

Below is the official English statement provided by Nintendo:

We would like to provide an update on the recent incidents of unauthorised access to some Nintendo Accounts.

While we continue to investigate, we would like to reassure users that there is currently no evidence pointing towards a breach of Nintendo’s databases, servers or services. As one action in our ongoing investigation, we are discontinuing the ability to use a Nintendo Network ID to sign in to a Nintendo Account. All other options to sign-in to a Nintendo Account remain available.

As a further precaution, we will soon contact users about resetting passwords for Nintendo Network IDs and Nintendo Accounts that we have reason to believe were accessed without authorisation.

In addition, we also continue to strongly encourage users to enable two-step verification for their Nintendo Account as instructed here: How to set-up two-step verification for a Nintendo Account.

If any users become aware of unauthorised activity, we encourage them to take the steps outlined in the article about the Nintendo Account recovery process.

During the investigation, in order to deter further attempts of unauthorised sign-ins, we will not reveal more information about the methods employed to gain unauthorised access.

We apologise for the inconvenience and concerns caused to our customers, and we will continue working hard to safeguard the security of our users’ data.

Based on security considerations, it is recommended that Nintendo users enable multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication requires the use of Google validator to generate a dynamic verification code when logging in to the account.

The advantage of this is that even if the account password is leaked accidentally, it will not be subject to unauthorized login.

At the same time, Nintendo Corporation encourages users not to use the same password, that is, the password credentials bound to the Nintendo account are not used on other websites or services.