Wii, N64, and GameCube Source Codes Leak Online

A massive data leak is hitting Nintendo as source code, demos, videos and other content for Wii, N64 and GameCube become available online, following the publishing of a steady stream of information on 4Chan in the past few weeks.

The first information about a possible Nintendo data leak appeared on Dexerto, with reports of canceled games named “Pokemon Pink.” The source code was published on 4Chan, and it seemed to be the entire extent of the breach.

Now, more information has been published on the forums, including source code for Nintendo Wii”s operating system boot0/1/2, along with the similar resources for N64 and GameCube. The leaked data arrive over the course of a few weeks, and a Resetera user indexed it all.

“The biggest and craziest thing in this leak is the datasheets, block diagram and Verilog files for every component,”said Atheerios, a ResetEra user. “Verilog is a hardware description language; is used to describe circuits via code, so with this we can learn how every single piece of the Wii was made.”

The data also contained several internal demos, an official GameBoy emulator and SDKs. There”s no indication that this is the extent of the data breach, and more may be on the way.

Nintendo has been silent so far, but the data breach may have originated with a partner company called BroadOn that worked on Nintendo Wii. While the leaked data pertains to old software and hardware, as none of the affected systems are still sold today, it”s still a problem for the company because the same source code can be used to develop emulators and similar hardware.

Unfortunately for Nintendo, this is the second time their name appears in the news concerning a security problem in short order. Just last week, the company admitted that around 160,000 accounts were compromised by attackers using a method called credential stuffing.

This goes to show that hackers are not always interested in bank accounts and private health data. Sometimes, they target some of the most unlikely sources.