Gaming Firm Shadow Experiences Data Breach

Cloud gaming firm Shadow has confirmed a significant data breach, compromising the personal information of its customers. The Paris-headquartered startup, known for offering games through its cloud-based PC service, revealed that hackers accessed customer data following a sophisticated social engineering attack.

Eric Sèle, Shadow's CEO, stated in an email to customers, "At the end of September, we were the victim of a social engineering attack targeting one of our employees." The attack, as described by Sèle, “began on the Discord platform with the downloading of malware under cover of a game on the Steam platform, proposed by an acquaintance of our employee, himself a victim of the same attack.”

Despite the company's immediate response, the attackers managed to access the management interface of one of Shadow's SaaS providers, leading to the unauthorized extraction of customer data. This breach was confirmed by a Shadow spokesperson when probed by TechCrunch.

The stolen data includes customers' full names, email addresses, dates of birth, billing addresses, and credit card expiry dates.

However, Shadow has assured its customers that no passwords or sensitive banking data were compromised in the breach. An individual claiming responsibility for the breach has stated on a popular hacking forum that they are selling the stolen database, which allegedly contains the personal data of more than 530,000 Shadow customers.

The hacker claims to have decided to sell the data after their attempts at an "amicable settlement" were ignored by the company, as reported by BleepingComputer. The hacker also stated “At the end of September, I gained access to the database of the French company Shadow. It contains only customers, not all Shadow users."

Shadow has since taken measures to reinforce its security protocols with its providers and has upgraded internal systems to prevent similar incidents in the future. The company is also advising its customers to be cautious of suspicious emails and to set up multi-factor authentication on their accounts for added security.

Eric Sele emphasized the company's commitment to transparency and expressed his sincere apologies to the customers for the inconvenience caused by the incident. The company has also made efforts to lock down its systems and reinforce security protocols with third-party providers following the breach.