The BBC is reporting that the hacking group behind this weekend’s claimed infiltration of Rockstar’s servers has said it will now publish stolen data online “as their demands had not been met.”
On Saturday April 11 it was reported that hacker group ShinyHunters had claimed to have gotten access to Rockstar’s servers hosted on Snowflake, and then threatened to release the data it had accessed unless Rockstar paid a ransom. Rockstar quickly responded to Kotaku saying that while “a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed,” the incursion would have “no impact on our organization or our players.”
It now seems that ShinyHunters is intending to carry out its threat of releasing this data, after telling the BBC that it had not been paid. The UK news organization writes, “The criminals did not tell the BBC how they carried out the Rockstar hack, but confirmed stolen data would be published online as their demands had not been met.”
The Beeb describes ShinyHunters, with whom it directly spoke, as “a prolific group of English-speaking cybercriminals, thought to be in their teens, who specialise in data theft and extortion.”
It’s thought that the alleged hack occurred after a security breach of Anodot, a cloud cost monitoring and analytics software service, that allowed ShinyHunters to access the data on the Snowflake servers, then use this as leverage to blackmail the Grand Theft Auto developer. As the BBC notes, law enforcement advice is to never pay these ransoms since it not only legitimizes the money-making method, but also makes it no less likely that the data will be leaked anyway.
There’s still no clear idea of what data has been taken, but Rockstar is certainly playing it very cool. ShinyHunters, should it go through with plans to publish the information, will likely post it to its dark web pages from which it’ll eventually filter to the wider public.