Nintendo Says 160,000 Switch Accounts Were Compromised, Check Yours

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Nintendo has been digging into a rather large breach that has happened with its Nintendo Network ID accounts, the type you use to login to Switch and other services. They have come back with some rather eye-popping results, and if you have not checked on the status of your own account, you should now.

Nintendo says that 160,000 accounts "may have received an unauthorized login" during this breach. While people in your account could not access your credit card information, they were able to view things like your birthday, location and email address. Nintendo suggests that you change your password for both the NNID, but also any other service where you use a similar password (as many of us do). Also, it's possible people could have purchased items within Nintendo's online stores with your saved payment information like Fortnite V-bucks or the like. If so, you can contact Nintendo and they're supposed to immediately cancel that transaction and get you a refund.

Past that, it's definitely time to turn on two-factor authentication. I'll explain that in a second, but first I need to reiterate how to check the status of your account, and while doing that, you can then turn on two-factor.

You can go to the Nintendo sign-in page here and log in.

After that, you want to head into Sign in and Security Settings.

Once you're there, you can see a list of places your account has been accessed. It might be your PC, if you just logged in from there, and it should hopefully be your Switch wherever your live. If you see some random, unfamiliar country you haven't been to, that's a problem, and you should change your password.

The settings

Nintendo

After that, you can enable two-factor authentication on the same security page, which will require you to download the Google Authenticator app on your phone. When you log in on a new device, that app will give you a special code you need to log in to prove it's you. Sounds like overkill but with breaches like this happening, it's definitely not.

160,000 is a hefty amount of compromised accounts, even if Nintendo does have millions of NNIDs out there through Switch and other past hardware. Hopefully they have learned some lessons and are able to prevent something like this from happening again in the future.

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