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An undisclosed number of Kickstarter users have been emailed with advice to reset their passwords after the company was made aware of a data breach that may have led to the disclosure of personal information.
Some time in the last 24 hours, Kickstarter updated their website to display a banner on the top of its site for logged-in users, advising them to change their password and providing a link to do so. The advice comes following a statement by Kickstarter – which was emailed to an undisclosed number of users – stating the company was made aware “by law enforcement officials” of hackers breaching their servers to steal account-related information. The advice also recommended users consider using tools such as 1Password or LastPass, which as well as offering storage to let you remember all your passwords, also include password generators to come up with randomised, highly-secure passwords (might I also recommend KeyPass, which does the same but also contains a meter telling you how “secure” any password you type in is likely to be?)
The following is the full text of the email as sent out by Kickstarter – I’ll leave the explaining to them as it puts it better than I could myself:
“On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers’ data. Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system.
No credit card data of any kind was accessed by hackers. There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on your account.
While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.
As a precaution, we strongly recommend that you change the password of your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password.
To change your password, log in to your account at Kickstarter.com and look for the banner at the top of the page to create a new, secure password. We recommend you do the same on other sites where you use this password. For additional help with password security, we recommend tools like 1Password and LastPass.
We’re incredibly sorry that this happened. We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting. We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. We are working closely with law enforcement, and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again.
Kickstarter is a vibrant community like no other, and we can’t thank you enough for being a part of it. Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. You can reach us at accountsecurity@kickstarter.com.
While it’s disappointing to hear of any type of hack where data is stolen – and a sad reflection of the state of the world today that not even a website that exists to give those with ideas but no money to make them real, the chance to connect with their potential market and get the funding they need, is safe from being hacked – it’s reassuring to see a company own up to the breach so quickly and waste no time in attempting to secure their service better and protect their users. I hope more companies learn from this example.
Another detail revealed during last night’s Nintendo Direct is the upcoming launch of another spin-off Pokémon game for the 3DS.
Pokémon Link: Battle!, known in America as Pokémon Battle Trozei, is the 3DS sequel to the DS game Pokémon Link/Trozei, which featured match-three style puzzles using Pokémon faces. Battle! sees you doing the same, playing out match-3 style puzzles with Pokémon – but this time, the puzzles take the form of Pokémon battles that progress based on your performance in the game. Burst the right number and type of tiny Pokémon heads and you deal damage to your opponent.
Pokémon Link: Battle! will feature all known Pokémon from Generations 1 through to the present day Gen 6; and all of them will be “befriendable”. The game will launch on the 3DS eShop in the UK on 13 March.
Now Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Punch-Out!! among new titles to get the Remix treatment.
Remember NES Remix – the Wii U eShop Download that, as I put it at the time, “first remembers classic NES Titles… then screws with them”? After the surprise announcement and rapid release of the original game in December, perhaps it should come as no surprise that in a Nintendo Direct last night, Satoru Iwata once again surprised us by announcing its successor.
Like the previous title, NES Remix 2 takes another selection of classic NES games; and sets you specific challenges to complete in each, both using the original title’s gameplay and then in “altered” versions, where whole new twists are added to radically change the game you once knew. This time around, the titles focus on the later era of the NES, such as Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, Punch-Out!!, Kirby Adventure, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Metroid, among others. The game will also feature a new “Championship Mode”, which was left unexplained.
As well as being a game made up of mini-games from other games, NES Remix 2 is also going to include a full-length game in its own right, in the form of “Super Luigi Bros.” Super Luigi Bros. is a fully playable, reversed version of Super Mario Bros, where you now play as Luigi throughout and can take advantage of his higher jumping ability; and in a new right-to-left viewpoint instead of the classic left-to-right.
NES Remix 2 will hit the Wii U eShop on 25 April, price TBC.
Imagine if you could simultaneously play a game on your smartphone while also doing something beneficial to the world as a whole – like helping scientists in the quest to beat cancer in real life? Thanks to a new app by Cancer Research, described as “the world’s first app designed to unravel genetic data”, anyone with an Android or iOS device can stop dreaming and do just that.
In Play To Cure: Genes In Space, players pilot a ship through a hazard-strewn course across space, blasting asteroids on their way, in an apparent mission to collect a valuable material called Element Alpha. As they play, their movements through the game actively aid research into identifying genetic markers that could help scientists identify cancer-causing genes in actual patients in real life.
Cancer Research scientists recently created graphs representing genetic data from 2,000 anonymous breast tumour patients. These graphs often have abnormalities where some part of the genetic make-up suddenly peaks or drops significantly at isolated points, which Scientists believe could identify potentially cancer-creating genes that could help further research into curing and preventing cancer. The problem is, while computers can pick out some likely problem areas themselves, sometimes the peaks are so subtle they can only be picked up by human eyes; and identifying the specific responsible genes also requires precision – so Scientists still need to look at the graphs themselves as well. The more eyes available, the quicker this process will be; but Scientists know that for most people, looking at graphs all day is plain boring.
So game developers at the company Guerilla Tea worked with scientists on an approach that involves regular people in the research while allowing them to have fun as well. The game developers have transformed the readouts into an intergalactic landscape, where your path and the hazards you face are based on a randomly-decided genetic sample. As your ship moves through the game, you map a path across the graph it was based on; and these movements are tracked by the game.
To ensure accuracy, each section of gene data will be tracked by several different players. The information is fed back to the scientists and as more players highlight the peaks and troughs, scientists identify those areas for further research. The anonymity of the cancer patients used for the study will be preserved, the developers promised.
Every single second gamers spend playing our smartphone game directly helps our work to beat cancer sooner. As you steer your spaceship through Element Alpha you are mapping a path behind you. That path is really useful to the scientists because it will help them to identify where the peaks and the troughs are in the data […] by understanding exactly where those peaks and troughs are, we can understand where to go and look for faults in genes that might be linked to cancer […] With [just a few minutes play per player,] we could have an absolutely mind-blowing impact in terms of accelerating research.
-Hannah Keartland, Citizen Science Project Lead, Cancer Research UK
The app is the second “citizen science” project by Cancer Research UK, after the success of Cell Slider, which was also used to aid Breast Cancer research. More than 200,000 people classified almost two million cancer images, reducing the time taken for researchers to analyse a subset of breast cancer samples from 18 months to just three.
