We have seen our share of hacker attacks on web sites in past several months. However, most of them have been against sites run by businesses or government agencies. This week, a hack attack was discovered by the operators of SWGalaxies.net, a fan site devoted to covering the MMO game Star Wars Galaxies. According to Venture Beat, the hacker group lifted over 21,000 email addresses and over 23,000 passwords from the site. A small hacker group called ObSec claimed credit for the attack and posted up the emails and passwords they lifted onto the Internet.
An analysis of the passwords by the site Identity Finder claims that 71 percent of them would be considered "weak". That means the passwords were too short, contained words found in the dictionary or did not contain any numbers or special characters. The people who created those passwords might be in danger of more hacks and identity theft due to their poor choice of password. On the other side of the password list is one person who had a password that was 42 characters long.
The operators of SWGalaxies.net, which is not officially affiliated with the game"s publishers Sony Online and LucasArts, said that the site itself is no longer being actively maintained. Earlier this summer Sony Online announced that it would be shutting down Star Wars Galaxies after over eight years. The game is scheduled to shut off its servers sometime in December. Meanwhile BioWare"s MMO title Star Wars The Old Republic is due out sometime in the holiday 2011 period.