Nvidia Investigates Claims That Its Online Stores Were Hacked

Graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia is investigating claims that hackers have compromised its online stores as part of a larger attack that affected several of its websites.On Friday, a hacker group calling itself Team Apollo claimed that one of Nvidia's online stores was compromised. As a result, the company suspended access to its Board Store and Gear Store websites. "Nvidia is investigating whether the store sites were hacked," Bea Longworth, Nvidia's senior PR manager for EMEAI (Europe, Middle East, Africa, India), said Monday via email. "We don't have any evidence that credit card data or customer lists have been put at risk, but we're investigating."

The news follows confirmed compromises of some of the company's other websites last week. "Nvidia Forums, Nvidia Developer Zone and Nvidia Research were compromised in what appears to have been a breach by third parties seeking sensitive information," Longworth said. On Thursday, Nvidia revealed that hackers had gained access to the Nvidia Forums databaseand stole usernames, email addresses, hashed passwords and user profile information. On the same day, the company also took its Developer Zone and Nvidia Research websites offline over suspicions of compromise. Those suspicions were confirmed on Friday, when a hacker posted hashed passwords for a proportion of DevZone users on a public website. Nvidia was not the only company forced to deal with data leaks that resulted from hacker attacks during the past week. On Tuesday, the company operating Formspring, a website where users can post and answer questions, disabled its users' passwords after 420,000 password hashes were posted on a forum. The company later confirmed that someone broke into one of its development servers and stole user account information from a production database. On Thursday, a hacker group published a list of 450,000 log-in credentials that it claimed to have stolen from the database of an unnamed Yahoo service. Yahoo later confirmed that the log-in credentials were from its Yahoo! Contributor Network service.