Sega have revealed that over two million email addresses have leaked due to a cyberattack on Japanese email delivery provider Arara, whom the Like A Dragon and Sonic publishers use to distribute newsletters. Sega and Arara are currently busy investigating what happened in the breach, which doesn’t appear to have affected the Sega accounts you can use receive in-game rewards and access a calendar which reminds you when it’s Kazuma Kiryu’s birthday. The companies have urged those who signed up for the affected newsletters to be wary of potential phishing attempts.
According to Automaton, who’ve translated Sega’s official press release about the cyberattack, 2,196,044 email addresses in total were affected. 92,273 of that number were linked to the newsletter distribution.
The company have listed some specific newsletter releases as having been affected, including two exhibition announcements for this year’s Tokyo Game Show, the announcement of arcade rhythm game Chunithm Mate’s launch, six newsletters about online character lottery service Sega Lucky Kuji Online, the launch of a rhythm game update dubbed Ongeki Re:Fresh Act.2, and the launch of another arcade rhythm game update called Maimai DX MAGiCAL. Number one, that’s a lot of rhythm games, and number two, Sega have advised those who opted in and received those newsletters to watch out for fishing emails from people posing as being tied to Sega or Arara.
Sega reportedly confirmed that – as far as the affected emails go – no names, dates of birth, genders, residential addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, and passwords are known to have been leaked. There had also been no reports of cases where the leaked information had been misused as of the time Sega made their announcement. The company have naturally put distributing any further email newsletters through Arara on hold until their investigation’s done and plan to reach out to each affected person individually once the full details of the leak have been confirmed.
While data breaches and cyberattacks are nothing new, there have been a fair few recently, with both Street Fighter makers Capcom and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 devs Warhorse suffering incidents of their own last month.