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Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

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61–70 of 72 posts

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#61
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the need to say it shouldn't be this way , to avoid an onslaught of replies, but: It would be dramatically easier to discover and exploit vulnerabilities/glitches in their multiplayer experience, which is their cash cow.

On the other hand, maybe the community could submit bug fixes for loading times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

I may be misremembering a drunken conversation with a developer but IIRC the root cause was choice of cross-platform APIs available in early 2010s & the JSON file was tiny when introduced.

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#62
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you trying to do that you can’t?

well GTA3 and Vice City got fully decompiled by some geniuses, 5 got leaked, the missing ones are San Andreas and 4.

I know. So, are you collecting, reading? Or trying to do something?

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, maybe the community could submit bug fixes for loading times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

I may be misremembering a drunken conversation with a developer but IIRC the root cause was choice of cross-platform APIs available in early 2010s & the JSON file was tiny when introduced.

The problem was not in delivering JSON. There were better ways, but it was good enough.

The failure is that loading times had been a complaint for years, and nobody involved lifted a finger. It would be impossible to use the platform without feeling the pain.

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be misremembering a drunken conversation with a developer but IIRC the root cause was choice of cross-platform APIs available in early 2010s & the JSON file was tiny when introduced.

The problem was not in delivering JSON. There were better ways, but it was good enough. The failure is that loading times had been a complaint for years , and nobody involved lifted a finger. It would be impossible to use the platform without feeling the pain.

I don't really disagree.

The software was released on 7 platforms, not counting multiple Windows versions. I don't know the risks or what platforms changes impact today or the test effort involved. I expect "it's still functioning as expected" was the default.

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#65

> “Rockstar Games, your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay or leak. This is a final warning to reach out by 14 Apr 2026 before we leak, along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.” Anyone familiar with "Snowflake" enough to say what sort of data was typically hosted there? Judging by the website and the lack of…

Snowflake is an MPP OLAP DB usually used for a data warehouse.

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#67
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well GTA3 and Vice City got fully decompiled by some geniuses, 5 got leaked, the missing ones are San Andreas and 4.

I know. So, are you collecting, reading? Or trying to do something?

The former. Having actual code to look at how people used to do things in the past, especially under the constraints that console games used to have before everything got boiled down to either a mobile phone SoC (Nintendo Switch) or a PC in shrinkwrap (Xbox, Playstation), is worth to have available in some public form.

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a database, but you could store basically any OLAP type things there, all your stuff for aggregate customer data for instance.

Sure, but some databases are sold/bought more by brand recognition and for the type of data rather than actual technical capabilities. Don't ask me why, just very familiar with people making those sort of choices.

Most I would say, but with snowflake it can be anything from some exec's fever dream to them actually paying 10x what they should and accomplishing said fever dream; I've worked on the entire spectrum when it comes to Snowflake.

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#69
post #41
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hackers actually keep their promises if paid the ransom, nowadays. It sounds perverse but the incentives require it: if payment didn't bring resolution, no one would pay. As a result, all of the big gangs avoid scamming.

Seems like there is an achilles heel for this business model: A "good guy" could start hacking companies, demand ransom while pretending to be one of the gangs, and then deliberately continuing the attack after the ransom is paid. Precisely to destroy this business model. The gangs would be fuming but there would be nothing they could do? Apart from trying to track down the "good guy" or introducing some sort of (cry…

"Chaotic good" guy, yes, but it's easy to know what groups hacked a company because the groups have their own blogs with known addresses and published victim lists.

If someone claiming to be LockBit hacked you, and you're not on the LockBit blog within a week, it's probably not really LockBit.

Re: Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom

#70
post #36

Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom This is just my opinion but that is not much of a threat and I think they should ignore it. Rockstars social platform has always had abhorrent security and players have always been able to easily doxx one another, know where other players live, boot each other out of games to the point of requiring multiple mod-menus just to be in a multi-…

> players have always been able to easily doxx one another, know where other players live, That sounds unlikely.

The actual case is that GTA Online sessions are P2P. As such, when connected to a session, your IP is exposed to the other players. This doesn’t really qualify as a ‘doxx,’ as that in and of itself is not particularly PII. Furthermore, playing without a menu is possible and has been for years. It just helps to boot yourself into a new/empty session every once in a while.
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