For weeks, players have been complaining that their Nintendo accounts have been hacked and that purchases have been made without their knowledge. Nintendo has acknowledged investigating the matter and is encouraging the move to two-factor authentication.
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An individual or a group seems to insistently and especially methodically attack Nintendo accounts of players around the world. Since last March, more and more people are reporting illicit access to their profile and, in some cases, complaining about purchases they claim to know nothing about. Very often, the intrusion is noticed only thanks to the system notification that a new device has connected to the account. As for purchases, they are made with the saved means of payment. Nintendo account holders who have associated a PayPal account or a credit card with it should therefore be particularly careful.
At first, the problem only seemed to affect Japan, but there are now reports in Europe and across the Atlantic. An editorArs Technica was notably the victim of an intrusion into his Nintendo account. Purchases are also far from painless: the pirate (s) would have a preference for the currency used in the game Fortnite (V-bucks) and would not hesitate to offer a nice financial extension to $ 100 / € / £. For the moment, testimonies seem to point to a usurpation of accounts due to a password reused on several platforms, but nothing is really confirmed and a flaw in the Nintendo system cannot yet be ruled out.
Nintendo investigation
After being silent for a while, Nintendo confirmed this week to Eurogamer that his teams were well aware of the wave of account access and illicit purchases. The firm announces that it “Investigation of the situation”. While waiting to find out more, she “Recommend that users enable two-step authentication for their Nintendo Account” and points to its dedicated help page.
If an access from an unknown device should be notified, she also recommends hastening to regain control of the account by following instructions on another help page. The first and essential step is to immediately change the account password, if necessary using the “forgotten password” procedure. Enabling two-factor authentication and removing the associated payment methods are the next steps.
If by chance the password protecting access to your Nintendo Account was also used for one or more other platforms, we strongly recommend that you change it. In view of the vagueness that still reigns over the method used by the pirate (s) to access the accounts, it would not be superfluous to proceed anyway with a change of sesame, the best protection remaining, as recommended by Nintendo, activation of a strong authentication method.
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