Before anyone has even gotten their hands on Grand Theft Auto 6, there are confirmed reports of grand theft… data.
A group of established ransomware hackers, collectively known as ShinyHunters, successfully breached Anodot, a third-party cloud cost-monitoring and business analytics provider used by developer Rockstar Games. According to the site Hackread, the hacker group posted a message on its dark website on Saturday, revealing its access to Rockstar’s Snowflake servers.
In a statement to Kotaku on April 11, Rockstar Games confirmed the data breach but said player information is safe.
“We can confirm that a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach,” according to the statement. “This incident has no impact on our organization or our players.”
The hack seems to be focused on corporate information, potentially including “contracts, financial documents, marketing plans and other data,” according to Kotaku. Anodot’s website lists a wide range of clients, including Puma, Vimeo, King, Tripadvisor and Credit Karma, among others.
It’s unclear how wide-reaching this hack is or how long the ShinyHunters group exploited Anodot’s security flaw. According to TechRadar, the hackers “managed to find Anodot’s authentication tokens, which allowed them to access customer Snowflake accounts.”
ShinyHunters released a statement threatening to publicly release the stolen data on April 14 if its ransom demands aren’t met.
“Rockstar Games, your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay or leak.” The statement says that if the company fails to “reach out” by the deadline, the hackers will also cause “several annoying (digital) problems.”
A representative from Rockstar Games did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A representative from Anodot could not be reached for comment.
Ransomware hackers
The ShinyHunters hacking group has made headlines in recent years for targeting large companies, including AT&T, Cisco, Microsoft and Ticketmaster.
It’s unclear if more information about Grand Theft Auto 6, the studio’s highly anticipated upcoming game, will make its way publicly onto the internet.
High-profile game studios have been targeted by ransomware hackers in the past, as leaks of internal assets and project roadmaps can be particularly devastating during years-long game development cycles.
In 2023, the Rhysida hacker group targeted Sony-owned Insomniac Studios, leaking more than a terabyte of internal data related to video games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, the upcoming Wolverine and other future projects and plans. In 2022, Rockstar Games was the target of a separate hack that revealed early footage and assets for Grand Theft Auto 6.
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