Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games has been targeted by hackers again. A group called ShinyHunters claims it broke into servers run by the third-party cloud provider Anodot. ShinyHunters said the stolen data would be published online as their demands had not been met.
Rockstar confirmed the hack in a statement to Kotaku, but said the breach was not serious and it has confirmed that it will not pay the ransom. A spokesperson explained, “We can confirm that a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach.”
The hacker group announced on April 11 that it accessed the data through Anodot (according to Cybersec Guru and Hackread). Hackers often target these third-party service providers, but ShinyHunters has not yet said what kind of data it took. After news of the hack, Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar’s parent company, saw its share price drop by more than 6% in pre-market trading. The stock price did rebound afterward to its usual levels.
Rockstar Games had beefed up its internal security following previous attacks, and it recently fired 30+ staffers in the UK and abroad, claiming that they had discussed “confidential information” in a public forum.
The layoffs have been heavily criticized, with the fired staffers claiming that they were being punished for wanting to establish a union.
In 2022, a UK teenager leaked gigabytes of early GTA 6 gameplay after getting into the company’s internal Slack chats. The hacker, who was part of a gang called Lapsus$, was eventually caught and received a life sentence in a prison hospital.
GTA 6 will be released on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Reports claim that the game’s online mode will not be available at launch.