Content leaks are not a rare thing in this day and age, especially when it comes to video games. They aren’t new either, video games have had their content leaked since the early days of SEGA and Nintendo. On Sunday September 18^th, 2022, Grand Theft Auto 6 was leaked well before the company was ready to even announce a release date. How are the developers handling this and how will this affect the security of Rockstar in the future? 

When people say that this leak was huge, they mean it, hours upon hours of gameplay footage, updated maps, protagonists, even new weapons, and combat were shown. This content was originally leaked on GTAforums and then was spread to other platforms. Many fans were skeptical about the validity of the forum post, but Rockstar later confirmed that the leak was real in a statement posted to twitter.  

A leak to this caliber can be detrimental to the development of the game and possibly push back the releases date weeks, months, or even years back. The reason why this leak is so crazy is because of the amount of content that was shared with the public. Normally when something like this happens it is on a much smaller scale by a hacker or an ex-game developer.  

The user who made the original post to the forum claimed to be the one to hack this information, they also claimed to be the same person who has hacked the Uber app days before this whole situation took place. Rocket has allegedly hired someone from the FBI to handle security measures and to find out how this happened in the first place. 

Rockstar is planning on increasing security measures, one of the ways that they would do this is limit the amount of time employees can work from home. This could potentially cause a lot of tension between workers and management, especially because a hacker was at fault and not an employee. The company has also made more of an effort to hire people to better handle their security as well, as they have made more job listings for security.  

The person behind this extreme security breach has been allegedly found and arrested. The hacker is apparently a 17-year-old boy from Oxfordshire and could potentially be a part of a hacking group called “Lapsus$”. This group is responsible for several cyber-attacks against huge corporations and even government agencies, they have been alleged to be behind the security threat that Ubisoft, another gaming company experienced back in March. 

This situation is still ongoing, and Rockstar will be dealing with the leak and people’s criticism for a while. Though it was only a leak of the game, people are worried that this will set back the development because people are already criticizing the graphics of the game before it has been completed. Other gaming companies have come to Rockstar’s defense about all of this on twitter. Hopefully the game can still come out on schedule and fans won’t have to worry about a delay. Leaks like this are no joke, they can ruin a company, hopefully a leak like this won’t happen again anytime soon.  

Article by Sophia Meek