By AJ Vicens
April 13 (Reuters) – A hacking group with a history of compromising major global corporations said it had stolen nearly 80 million business records from video game developer Rockstar Games, the maker of Grand Theft Auto.
The claim was posted to the website used by the ShinyHunters hacking group on Saturday, according to data collected by cybercrime research platform eCrime.ch.
A representative of the hacking group told Reuters in an online chat on Monday it has 78.6 million records from Rockstar’s account with Snowflake, a large corporate data management company. Rockstar’s Snowflake data was accessed via a compromise of data from Anodot, an AI-powered business analytics platform, the hacking group representative said.
Rockstar’s parent company, New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Rockstar Games spokesperson said in an email that the company “can confirm that a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach. This incident has no impact on our organization or our players.”
The incident is “not a compromise of Snowflake’s platform or environment, but rather a result of a compromise of Anodot,” a Snowflake spokesperson said in an email.
A representative for Israel-based Anodot could not be reached for comment outside its normal business hours.
After discovering unusual activity, Snowflake “proactively disabled all user accounts referencing Anodot from connecting to Snowflake,” the Snowflake spokesperson said.
Tech industry news site Bleeping Computer reported https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/stolen-rockstar-games-analytics-data-leaked-by-extortion-gang/ that the stolen data includes in-game revenue and purchase metrics, player behavior tracking and game economy data for the popular Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online titles.
Reuters could not immediately verify the data.
The ShinyHunters representative declined to comment on whether the hacking group demanded money from Rockstar or whether there has been interaction between it and Rockstar or Take-Two.
More than 160 Snowflake customers were targeted https://cyberscoop.com/as-many-as-165-companies-potentially-exposed-in-snowflake-related-attacks-mandiant-says/ in data theft and extortion attempts over several months in 2024, including Ticketmaster, Santander Group, and Advance Auto Parts.
(Reporting by AJ Vicens in DetroitEditing by Rod Nickel and Lincoln Feast.)
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