Potentially bad news for Ubisoft as its upcoming AAA title may have already been seriously compromised, with a ransomware gang claiming it’s breached the internal networks of both Ubisoft and Crytek.
As ZDNet reports, the group, which goes by the name of Egregor, claims to have access to the internal network of both game publishers/developers, highlighting the upcoming Watch Dogs: Legion as a title that they may have access to.
That may is important, because the Watch Dogs leak – typically an activity undertaken to publicise their ability and presumably draw more ransom money from victim companies – could come from Watch Dogs: Legion, but equally could be from an older Watch Dogs title, if it’s genuine at all. The leak of Ubisoft data comprised only 20MB in total.
It could be worse for Crytek, however, with the group leaking 300MB of data, although this was information from a wide range of Crytek software, including its games such as Warface and Arena of Fate as well as Crytek’s Gface social gaming network.
According to Egregor representatives quoted by ZDNet, they had access to Ubisoft’s internal networks but only filched code, whereas they claim to have “fully encrypted” Crytek. They do claim that they haven’t asked for any specific ransom – at least, not yet.
The group claims that if it’s not contacted by Ubisoft, “we will begin posting the source code of upcoming Watch Dogs and their engine”.
So what can you do with source code to a game anyway? It very much depends on how complete the leak is and how wide it spreads; in theory you might be able to compile some kind of working copy if it’s a very large leak of Watch Dogs data, although busting out only 20MB from one source and 200MB in another doesn’t tend to point that way.
However any kind of leak is an issue when you’re talking about a game that could then fall victim to exploits and hacking as a result of its source code being public even in part.
Watch Dogs Legion is due for release on October 29, 2020, or potentially earlier if this hacking group is on the level.
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