Hackers released the data they stole from the creators of GTA, but players won’t reveal what they were hoping for

Published data without key information

Hacker group ShinyHunters released the stolen data a day before the deadline they set for Rockstar. Unfortunately for video game enthusiasts, the released files don’t seem to contain any information about the game GTA VI, mostly. mainly consist of business and financial data.

According to the report, the data primarily includes “internal analytics used to track Rockstar’s online services and support requests.” This reportedly includes data on the earnings of Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online, showing how much money each title brings in on a daily and weekly basis, as well as metrics on in-game revenue, purchases and tracking of gamer behavior. Data also suggests that PlayStation 5 is the platform with the highest number of games and revenue for GTA Online.

After the first news about the attack, Rockstar confirmed the breach, but downplayed its importance.

“We can confirm that a limited amount of intangible company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach,” the company said. They emphasized that the incident “has no impact on our organization or our games”.

How did the attack happen?

Rockstar Games became the victim of a chain of attacks carried out by the ShinyHunters group on dozens of companies through the analytics platform Anodot. The hackers were able to find the company’s authentication tokens, which allowed them to access user accounts on the Snowflake data storage platform. They also tried to access Salesforce accounts, but were allegedly prevented from doing so.

The group also sent a threatening message to the company with a deadline for paying the ransom.

“Rockstar Games, your Snowflake data has been compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay up or we’ll release it,” ShinyHunters allegedly said. “This is a final warning to get in touch with us by April 14, 2026 before we release the data, along with a few nasty (digital) issues that will befall you. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.”

It’s not the first time Rockstar has been targeted

This is not the first time that Rockstar Games has faced hacker attacks. In September 2022, the company suffered a significant attack by the Lapsus$ group, when 90 videos of the development version of Grand Theft Auto VI were leaked. That incident cost the company five million dollars and thousands of working hours invested in repairing the damage. The person responsible, teenager Arion Kurtaj, was sentenced in 2023 to an indefinite period of time in hospital detention.

Cybersecurity experts point out that third-party attacks, such as the one by Anodot, pose an increasing risk to large companies. The ShinyHunters group is known for its attacks on corporations such as Microsoft, Cisco and Ticketmaster. In 2024 alone, more than 160 users of the Snowflake platform were targeted by similar data theft and extortion attempts.