Nival

One of the hacks reported by HaveIBeenPwned back in February of 2016 is that of the Russian based gaming organization by the name of Nival. Nival is an independent developer whose staff focuses primarily on strategy games and competitive play. Some of the games created by Nival that readers may be familiar with are Prime World, Blitzkrieg, Prime World: Defenders, King’s Bounty: legions, and Etherlords.

The technical information pertaining to this hack was posted for users to follow on a Reddit post. Although the Nival company mainly deals with gaming content, hackers were able to steal sensitive data such as personal email addresses, real names, date of birth, avatar photos, website activity and even private images that were shared among the users. Over 1.5 million accounts were compromised during this breach with countless documents and pieces of sensitive information being distributed among the hacker community over the net.

The individuals behind this attack claims this hack comes as a protest against the foreign policy within Russia towards the Ukraine. Similarly, the hacker detailed a very disgruntled objection towards the military forces from Russia using deceptive tactics (Maskirovka) to trick the general population. In older times this meant the use of camouflage and dummies in order to bait the opponent into a vulnerable position. Although this approach has been taken out of the public eye, the hacker behind the Nival breach claims that Russia used these tactics in order to shoot down a plane from his home country in an illegal fashion.