Nintendo has become the latest victim in a wave of hacking attacks, the Japanese gaming company confirmed.
The firm said its United States unit's website had been hacked but that no company or customer information had been compromised.
The news comes after a huge security breach at its rival Sony compromised personal details of tens of millions of its gaming customers' accounts, including credit-card numbers.
A hacker group called Lulz Security, or LulzSec, published a "server configuration file" purportedly from a Nintendo secure server on the internet.
Via Twitter, LulzSec said it was not targeting Nintendo. "We sincerely hope Nintendo plugs the gap," it said. LulzSec later said the security hole had been plugged. "Re: Nintendo, we just got a config file and made it clear that we didn't mean any harm. Nintendo had already fixed it anyway," the group wrote.
A Nintendo spokesman acknowledged a breach. "We are always working to make sure our systems are secure," he said. The attack comes as Nintendo prepares to launch a new online service this week at E3, the annual video games conference in Los Angeles.
LulzSec also hacked some of Sony's sites last week. "We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over one million users' personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts," LulzSec said in a statement. Sony has contacted the FBI.
The incident is the latest in a global wave of high-profile hacking attacks. The military firm Lockheed Martin and the US public news service PBS have also been attacked recently. Last week hackers based in China broke into Gmail accounts used by US government officials. Anonymous, the hacking group that launched a series of attacks against financial institutions in defence of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, recently made public more than 10,000 emails it stole from Iran's ministry of foreign affairs.
The incidents come as the US government rewrites its military rulebook to make cyber-attacks a possible act of war.
