Ransomware crews are bottom of barrel scum of the internet regardless of who the victim is
CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
51–60 of 252 posts
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#52Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago.
It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has ruined mobile gaming and is now making its way into console and PC gaming. As an intern I attended a company-wide meeting where the CEO proclaimed that game quality didn't matter and making money is the sole focus. On the other side of the war, a very vocal subset of the gamers is treating gaming as the only purpose their lives have, and will viciously attack developers personally with death threats and doxxing, or review-bomb even unrelated games into oblivion if the game publisher did something wrong. Which will hardly affect the giants at all (what will you do, not buy the next game from a popular series?), but can crush indie developers. Not to mention the whole work culture that expects any game developer to work 80h per week for less pay because you "love gaming".
CDPR devs must be close to a nervous breakdown by now. Crunching for months/years despite their bosses promising it won't happen, seeing their game released too early and then ripped apart by critics and fans, and finally getting their personal data leaked.
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#53The note makes it seem like the attackers got access to their internal network; but the (admittedly little) information I have on the subject indicates that the perforce server was hosted on the internet with username/password access (not cert based authentication as is recommended by Helix these days). I suppose the IT team got overwhelmed with requests to open up the firewall for people working from home during the…
> I suppose the IT team got overwhelmed with requests to open up the firewall for people working from home during the pandemic and just opened it for the whole internet. I would expect access to source code to be strictly from a VPN with controlled IPs, people shouldn't be accessing such sensitive information directly from their IPs, exactly because it makes it very hard to control access.
There is one caveat there: when everyone comes from the same IP (the VPN server's IP) it makes it difficult to determine (from regular HTTP server logs) who accessed what (e.g., when you think that there may be an attacker on your network).
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#54Do companies ever give into straightforward extortion like this? It doesn't seem like it would ever make sense for a company to pay the ransom. Do hackers like these have some kind of smart play that I'm missing?
It only really obviously makes sense to pay in one scenario: they've encrypted everything (including backups), or you didn't have backups at all. Having immutable / offsite / offline backups may well be less common than one would hope.
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#55Reading the replies there tells me I did the right thing when I decided against a career in game development over a decade ago. It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has r…
Read up on Jonathan Blow [1], sounds like you might like his philosophy. The short of it is that he believes time is valuable and should be respected. I also love Braid, a game he made.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow#Philosophy_and_v...
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had one "I need to reload the game or else it won't work"-type of bug in 100 hours of gameplay. I have seen games that have been much much worse 4 years after the release than this game in it's current state.
On PC, I had softlocks, hardlocks, being catapulted at the other side of the map after climbing up a pile of trash, T-posing enemies with disabled AI, dead bodies talking, and plenty, plenty more. Neither your experience or mine is more valid, simply that "it did/didn't happen to me" isn't a good defense. Additionally, Cyberpunk is also being shat on for lacking mechanics or half-assing them. Cops being the more obvi…
Same, about 60 hours in, and while I only had one game breaking bug (can not finish a cyberpsycho mission because the body I'm meant to investigate dropped through the floor), physics and AI bugs (I got catapulted like you said about a dozen times, cars are notoriously terrible, I died from "falling" down a 20cm drop more than 20 times) are plentiful. I'd estimate I've had to reload a save between 5 and 10 times to continue progress.
It hurts immersion badly, but as far as raw gameplay/shooting goes, I just beared with it, the game saves often enough that I rarely lost more than 5 minutes of progress.
Saying it's "hardly more bugs than most early access/new releases" is something that I've seen too often though. I'd be willing to assume my experience is way outside of the norm, if I didn't have a number of friends I played along with and that reported the exact same (sometimes worse) experience on PC.
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#57Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#58Ironic
Please explain how a company being hacked is ironic?
The game itself looks like it was hacked already. Some of the filler assets are CDPR internal documents, there are many obvious typos (vending machines with „devilery” instead of „delivery”, „nigth city” on the border crossing).
Plus stories found in the shards - allusions to Q&A processes in games/software projects, rebellion in space against mandatory crunch…
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#59Do companies ever give into straightforward extortion like this? It doesn't seem like it would ever make sense for a company to pay the ransom. Do hackers like these have some kind of smart play that I'm missing?
If a company has paid for insurance, might make sense to just pay.
Re: CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
#60Do companies ever give into straightforward extortion like this? It doesn't seem like it would ever make sense for a company to pay the ransom. Do hackers like these have some kind of smart play that I'm missing?
Usually they are betting on the company not having any backups in which case they usually do pay the ransom to restore their data.