Nintendo Global Anti-Piracy Team

The Nintendo Global Anti-Piracy Team is a team at Nintendo designed to unify security and anti-piracy efforts at Nintendo, formed in late 2016 or early 2017. Before this time, security efforts at Nintendo were split between Nintendo Technology Development (NTD), NCL, and NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development). This led to - according to an internal presentation leaked as a part of the Zammis Clark Breach on December 21, 2020 - poor communication and a lack of a unified security strategy. This led to the creation of the Nintendo Global Anti-Piracy Team, made up of individuals from NTD, NCL, and NERD.

One of the first activities of this group was to perform penetration testing on a Nintendo Switch SDEV 1.8 pre-release development kit in late 2016 or early 2017, where they found several vulnerabilities, including a hardware bug in the random number generator. These were presumably reported to the Horizon OS kernel development team (the team that such bugs are listed as being reported to in another Global AP Team presentation) and presumably fixed, although considering the approximate date of these bugs being reported these issues may be present in early production Nintendo Switch units.

The team appears to have been formalised on April 17, 2017, considering that an internal presentation labelled "GlobalAPteamkickoff" was dated to that time, and meetings were held with NTD on April 18 and 19, 2017, although it is possible that the group started activities some months earlier, as the random number generator bug was reported in an NVIDIA presentation dated December 19, 2016 (it is not known which company initially discovered the bugs).