Month: November 2020

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Earlier this month, Capcom revealed that there had been "unauthorized access carried out by a third party" on its internal computer systems, but the company added that "at present there is no indication that any customer information was breached." This morning, though, Capcom revealed more details of the "customized ransomware attack" affecting its internal systems, potentially including the leak of personal information for up to 350,000 people.

After a two-week investigation, the Japanese company says it can only confirm that personal information was accessed for current and former employees. But the list of "potentially compromised" people is much larger, including callers to Capcom's Japanese help desk, Capcom Store customers, members of Capcom's North American esports teams, company shareholders, and former applicants for Capcom jobs.

The information revealed in the attack generally includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. But current and former employees had their passport information and signature revealed, Capcom says, while job applicants may have had personal photos leaked.

Enlarge / Choose your weapons. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

With many organizations now having a significant portion of staff working remotely—and as things are looking, this is going to be the longterm reality—the old model of how companies support a "mobile" workforce is not exactly holding up well.

I've already covered some of the issues related to having a home-based workforce in previous articles in this series. Some companies are now giving employees an allowance to upgrade their home office to something more suitable for longterm habitation. And we've already gone over the network security and architecture challenges that come into play as well.

But as we push closer to a full year of full- or part-time home work with no end in sight, the old model for what is considered "mobile worker" support on the hardware front is starting to show some serious gaps.