Data Breach: Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto leaked

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Data Breach: Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft : The Trilogy – Online game leaked

A hacker going by the handle “teapotuberhacker” posted 90 videos containing 50 minutes of in-development game footage to GTAForums on September 18, 2022. The Guardian said that the footage was from various phases of development, with some films being around a year old, and Schreier confirmed with sources at Rockstar that it was legitimate. The video shows a modern-day Vice City backdrop, animation and gameplay tests, level designs, and character discussions. It also shows Jason and Lucia, the game’s protagonists, breaking into a strip club and robbing a café. The hacker claimed responsibility for the earlier-week security breech at Uber. They claimed to have source code, assets, and internal builds and to have downloaded the files directly from Rockstar’s Slack groups. and that they possessed source code, assets, and internal builds of both the new game and Grand Theft Auto V, which they threatened to leak.

In response, Take-Two filed takedown requests with YouTube under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for videos displaying or discussing the leaks, and it also contacted the administrators of GTAForums and Reddit to request access be revoked. With Rockstar or Take-Two, the hacker claimed to be “trying to negotiate a deal.” One of the largest leaks in video game history, according to several journalists; Schreier dubbed it “a nightmare for Rockstar Games” that would reduce employees’ ability to work remotely. According to Jefferies analyst Andrew Uerkwitz, it was a “PR nightmare” that would delay the game and lower employee morale but had little chance of affecting sales or public opinion. The Guardian reported that the quality of the leaked video was being heavily criticized “by ill-informed users”.  Some users erroneously claimed that graphics and art assets are finalised early in game development. In solidarity, many industry developers shared work-in-progress footage of their own games .

On September 19, Rockstar acknowledged that the leak was a “network intrusion,” regretted the way the game was initially shown off, but did not foresee any long-term impacts on production. Take-Two continued by saying that measures had been made “to contain and isolate this situation.” Pre-market trading that day saw a more than 6% decline in the stock price of the corporation; however, after Take-Two’s announcement, the price of the stock rose. Uber stated that it was collaborating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Department of Justice and admitted any connections to its own security breach that might have occurred. They felt the hacker belonged to the collective Lapsus$, which is thought to have compromised firms like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung over the previous year.

The hacker claims to have stolen “GTA 5 and 6 source code and assets, GTA 6 testing build,” but is trying to extort Rockstar Games to prevent further data from being released. 

However, the threat actor says they are accepting offers over $10,000 for the GTA V source code and assets but are not selling the GTA 6 source code at this time.

The threat actor claimed responsibility for the recent cyberattack on Uber after forum users expressed doubt that the hack was legitimate. As additional evidence, he released pictures of Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto 6 source code. Other than saying they were taken from Rockstar’s Slack and Confluence servers, the hacker hasn’t explained how they got their hands on the GTA 6 movies and source code.

The threat actor also claims to be the same hacker, going by the handle “TeaPots,” who was responsible for the recent Uber cyberattack, although BleepingComputer was unable to verify these assertions. However, the threat actor also managed to access the company’s internal Slack server and other services during the cyberattack on Uber through a social engineering attack on an employee.