SINGAPORE — Gaming hardware company Razer has allegedly suffered a data breach, after a seller on a hackers' forum offered stolen data for US$100,000 (S$134,898) in cryptocurrency on Saturday (July 8).

The firm said in a Twitter post on Monday that it is aware of a potential breach and is investigating.

Checks by The Straits Times found that the data being sold included the source code and back-end access logins for Razer's website and its products.

This included folders labelled zVault — referring to Razer's digital wallet that was launched in March 2017 and later gave way to Razer Gold in December 2018 — as well as those allegedly containing encryption keys and files pertaining to its reward system.

A sample seen by ST also showed the alleged e-mail addresses of customers with virtual credit in Razer Gold accounts. The seller claimed to have 404,000 accounts, but this could not be verified.

On the hackers' forum, the seller said he would sell the data to only one customer for an asking price of US$100,000 in the Monero cryptocurrency.

However, he added that he would be open to offers lower than the stipulated amount.

Unlike other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, in which information on transactions is public due to them taking place on the blockchain, transactions on Monero are private, according to the cryptocurrency's website.

A screenshot of the allegedly stolen data that was put up on a hackers' forum on July 8, 2023.

Users of the cryptocurrency are anonymous by default, and information on transactions are concealed, making it harder to see which wallet sent or received the money.

ST has contacted Razer for more information, including whether customers' personal information, such as their credit card details, was stolen, and if this data breach was linked to the one the home-grown firm suffered in 2020.

In the earlier breach, the personal and shipping information of about 100,000 Razer customers globally was leaked due to a server misconfiguration.

Razer sued its IT vendor Capgemini for the security breach, after a former employee at the latter firm added a "#" command to a line of code, disabling the security settings of a computer system.

As a result, data stored in the system was leaked to the public between June 18, 2020, and Sept 10, 2020. The High Court awarded Razer US$6.5 million in damages on Dec 9, 2022.

However, Capgemini's lawyers lodged an appeal on Monday that it should pay only nominal damages to Razer instead of the total amount, citing how Razer had failed to take action despite a cyber-security consultant alerting the firm to the breach five times.

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This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.