Privacy hacktivists touch up Angry Birds after company reportedly flocked to NSA

Entertainment

When reports surfaced that U.S. and British spies might have intercepted players’ personal data, hackers vandalized the website of the popular game.

"The defacement was caught in minutes and corrected immediately," Saara Bergstrom, a spokeswoman for the game’s creator Rovio Entertainment, told the AP. "The end-user data was in no risk at any point."

The motivation for the paint job likely was a leak indicating the National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ had tapped various smartphone apps, including Google Maps and Angry Birds.

Rovio maintains it does not "share data, collaborate or collude" with any spy agencies.

But company Chief Executive Officer Mikael Hed said the customer details could have been accessed from information gathered by third-party advertising agencies.

"In order to protect our end users, we will, like all other companies using third-party advertising networks, have to re-evaluate working with these networks if they are being used for spying purposes," he said.

ThreatWatch is a regularly updated catalog of data breaches successfully striking every sector of the globe, as reported by journalists, researchers and the victims themselves.