Atlus.com hacked, pulled down

Visitors to the official site of Atlus today may have come in search of the latest on localized titles like Steal Princess and Crimson Gem Saga but left with a malicious computer virus. Friday afternoon, Atlus sent out an e-mail to its newsletter subscribers notifying them that the company's Web domain was "hacked and compromised."

"A third-party entity embedded malicious code into the script, and regretfully, for a period of a few hours (from roughly 9:00am PST until 2:30pm PST), this malicious software (which we believe we have identified as a Trojan) may have made its way onto your systems," the letter stated. "The faith and trust of our fans is of the utmost importance to us, a responsibility we don't take lightly. As such, we are deeply troubled by this development, and we are now working to repair and restore the website."

The company then advised all of its fans to use antivirus software on their computers, regardless of whether or not they had visited the Atlus site recently. Currently the publisher is investigating the security breach and has not offered any further explanation as to how it happened.

The site had been pulled offline and had not resumed operations by 5 p.m. Pacific time.