Insomniac Games suffered a hack by Rhysida on December 12. The group posted limited data to prove they have breached the security and gain access to sensitive data to coax the company, or its parent company Sony, or any willing buyer, 50 bitcoins (around USD $2 million, about RM9 million) for exclusive access to the data.
One week has passed and the Rhysida group has since leaked all non-sold data 1.67TB in size. According to Cyberdaily.au, 2 percent of the full data was not uploaded, and there was a buyer for the rest of the data.
The stolen, hacked data, now leaked to the public, including personal identifiable data of people who work, and worked, at Insomniac. This is awful news, as the privacy of all the affected employees have been violated. In Malaysia, we may have been used to data leaks over and over again, but it usually only affected us in that we’re getting scam calls every other day. In the US, the threat of being doxxed is more dire.
There are also rough footages of Marvel’s Wolverine, the studio’s next game. Given that there are mostly test visuals that intended to look rough as it’s for internal use only, let’s not look into that as much out of respect to the game developers.
Various game developers, whether that be from Insomniac or otherwise, has implored game journalists to not cover the leaked test footage. Or even the cover the leak in general. (It’s a whole discourse which we will not be leaving links to.)
The hack has also leaked internal documents which includes the recent sales of all PlayStation first-party games (and whether they make money or not based on development budget each game has, which also were part of the now-leaked documents), as well as a roadmap of future Insomniac Games releases.
Insomniac Games has yet to officially address the situation.
There has been at least four major hacks to a game development studio where the hackers blackmail the studios in three years. Capcom was hacked in 2020. CD Projekt RED was hacked in 2021. Rockstar Games was hacked, leaking test footage of what we know as GTA VI, was last year, and now Insomniac.
If anything, game companies should consider beefing up their cybersecurity now that this is basically an annual trend.
UPDATE 23/12/23: Insomniac Games has released its response to the hack: