Many of you may remember Rockstar was hacked several years ago, resulting in several devastating GTA 6 leaks which culminated in the arrest of a 17-year-old.
That individual was sentenced to life in a hospital prison, and will only be released if doctors decide he’s no longer a threat to others.
The spectre of that incident still looms large, though, and rumours started swirling earlier today that it may happen again.
Writing on its dark web page, a hacker group named ShinyHunters claimed to have obtained sensitive materials from the Scottish studio this morning, and is demanding a 14th April deadline for the dev to pay up or it’ll leak the potentially sensitive materials.
Rockstar has since commented on the incident, confirming a “limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach”.
Here’s its statement in full:
“We 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 organisation or our players.”
So Rockstar is definitely playing this down, but ShinyHunters is urging the studio to “make the right decision”.
Here’s what it said in its ransom note earlier today:
“Rockstar Games, your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay or leak. This is a final warning to reach out by 14th April 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.”
For context, Snowflake is the name of a cloud-hosting company that provides storage for a number of major, high profile firms.
As mentioned in the ransom note, it seems this information was obtained via Anodot, a cloud cost monitoring and analytics software service.
Anodot recently suffered a security breach, paving the way for ShinyHunters to seize the aforementioned data. That would also align with Rockstar’s statement.
Obviously any kind of data breach can be potentially devastating, and ShinyHunters does have a reputation for ransoming major organisations like Microsoft and TicketMaster in the past.
Rockstar appears calm about the situation in its statement, but we suppose this story will develop as that 14th April deadline looms large.