May 13, 2011 15:56 GMT  ·  By

Hackers have managed to break into servers belonging to Eidos Interactive, a reputed game publisher now owned by Square Enix, and stole sensitive data.

The hackers who instrumented the attack seem to be affiliated with the so-called Anonymous splinter group that recently took over AnonOps, the hacktivist collective's IRC network.

The target seems to have been the Deus Ex Human Revolution website which is dedicated to the upcoming game from the Deus Ex franchise.

On Thursday morning the first page of the website displayed a message reading "Owned by Chippy1337" and "Hacked by Xero (Ryan King), XiX (Ian Summers), Evil Hom3r, Viral (Ryal Cleary), Nikon, Venuism (Aaron Lingard)."

However, according to IRC logs that surfaced after the incident, the real hackers went by the handles of evo and n` (nigg), two Anonymous members known to have been involved in the recent Anonymous coup.

The handles and names placed on the defaced page were intentional and designed to cause problems for those individuals. The logs leaked by someone who monitored the hackers' chat room, reveal that evo had much more devious plans for the deusex.com website.

"We should put 0day or exploits in the pdf and see if someone logs in. We will use a RAT [Remote Administration Tool] that will be the payload.

"One thing that would be funny, I write a nasty virus that will bsod [blue screen of death] on startup, [expletive] up all your drives, delete tons of files, forkbom on start, etc.

"We put that in an exploit kit on the main page. There [sic.] security will be responsible for like thousands of [expletive] up computers and it would make the news," evo wrote.

The techniques described are commonly used by cyber criminals to infect computers in drive-by download attacks, which suggests that evo might be familiar with this type of activity.

Fortunately nigg disagreed with the idea, not because of some ethical reasons, but because there wasn't enough time to put it into practice.

Instead they went for the defacement and leaking of captured information. A torrent was uploaded to The Pirate Bay claiming to contain 370 CVs and the website's user database.

Square Enix later confirmed that eidosmontreal.com and two product websites were compromised by a group of hackers. As a result, the company said, up to 350 CVs and 25,000 email addresses used by people to register for updates, have been stolen.