What we know about the alleged hacker attack on Epic Games (Fortnite)
The Mogilevich hacking crew claims to have breached the Fortnite developer's security systems, stealing over 200 GB of data, and are now demanding a ransom. Epic Games, however, denies having suffered a hacker attack
Hackers boarding the video game Fortnite ? We don't know yet, as we will see shortly. But one can understand why its flagship title could be a prey capable of tempting more than one attacker, given that the IP in the hands of Epic Games was able to invoice 9 billion and drag over 45 million gamers onto its servers in a just one day (to be clear, the equivalent of the population of Spain).
In reality, it is not yet known what really happened in the last few hours. There is in fact a lot of confusion on the matter, fueled by Epic Games itself, the alleged victim of the affair, which declared that at the moment the internal investigation launched to understand whether the violation advertised by the cybercriminals was actually committed has not brought any evidence. The software house, in the limelight in recent years due to the long legal dispute with Apple and Google, also tried to contact the software pirates, without success. But let's go in order.
THE (ALLEGED) HACKER ATTACK ON EPIC GAMES
In the last few hours, the Mogilevich cyber pirate crew declared, through a post, that they had stolen over 200 Gigabytes of data from Epic Games for extortion purposes. This would be information relating to registered users (passwords, email addresses, names, source codes, payment systems, etc.) and if Epic Games wants to recover them it will have to do so by March 4th.
A full-blown ultimatum. Even if it is not made explicit, as in many other similar cases where the blackmailed person is not paid, the data could end up for sale on the deep web: there it would then end up in the hands of those who have an interest in creating false profiles or of those who try to cross-reference them to obtain access to other types of databases, mainly banking ones.
THE SCARY PRECEDENT
In the world of video games there is a precedent that scares software houses: that of the Rhysida ransomware group which at the end of last year published numerous data apparently stolen from the development studio Insomniac Games, after having hacked its cloud storage system.
In that case too, a ransom demand was posed with an ultimatum, which Sony refused. Let's not forget that paying does not guarantee the return of the stolen goods, as it can easily be copied and stored in the cloud. However, only images of a title still in progress, Marvel's Wolverine , and some employee data from the hacked studio ended up online. In this new story, assuming the hacking has actually been carried out, user data could also be in the hands of computer pirates.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cosa-sappiamo-sul-presunto-attacco-hacker-a-epic-games-fortnite/ on Fri, 01 Mar 2024 06:51:57 +0000.