Threat actor Lapsus$ is now seemingly responsible for hacking gaming giant Rockstar Games after targeting mega-brands like Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, Nvidia, Okta and probably Uber.
An account operating name ‘teapotuberhacker’ posted on GTAForums around 90 videos of what appeared to be in-development footage of the upcoming Rockstar Games installment, Grand Theft Auto 6 – that the publisher confirmed it was working on earlier this year.
The videos, which totaled around 50 minutes of footage, included short clips of animation tests to more detailed animation scenes. They were then widely shared on social media.
After posting the alleged in-development footage on September 18, 2022, teapotuberhacker left a message claiming they wanted to “negotiate a deal” with the game publisher to return unreleased data, including the source code for Grand Theft Auto 5 and the in-development version of Grand Theft Auto 6.
“This is not the first case where a cyber-criminal group has stolen an organization’s source code, with both LastPass and Midea Group suffering a similar fate in the last month. Source code is part of a company’s intellectual property and therefore holds massive value to cyber criminals. It can be used to find hidden security vulnerabilities and launch further attacks on a business,” Sam Linford, VP of EMEA Channels at Deep Instinct, told Infosecurity.
However, in a message to Infosecurity on September 19, Craig McDonald, VP of Product Management at BackBox, insisted that at present, “it is still unclear if the attacker gained access to data beyond the video clips that were posted.”
Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, acknowledged the leak on September 19, 2022.
In a statement posted to Twitter, Rockstar said: “We recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto. At this time, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects. [..] Our work on the next Grand Theft Auto game will continue as planned, and we […] will update everyone again soon and, of course, will properly introduce you to this next game when it is ready.”
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