The source code for Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA 5) was released online on Christmas Eve, just over a year after Rockstar Games was hacked by the Lapsus$ pirate group. Links to download this source code were shared on several channels, including Discord, a dark web site and a Telegram channel previously used by the hackers to broadcast some of the data stolen from Rockstar.
GTA 5: source code released online on Christmas Eve!
Rockstar Games was hacked in 2022 by members of the Lapsus$ hacker group. They accessed the company’s internal Slack server and Confluence wiki. At the time, the hackers claimed to have stolen the source code and assets of GTA 5 and GTA 6, including a test version of GTA 6, with some of the stolen content leaked on forums and Telegram. The threat’s author had also shared samples of GTA 5’s source code as proof of the theft. The group’s name recently came back into the spotlight when a man named Arion Kurtaj, also a member of Lapsus$, released preliminary videos of Grand Theft Auto 6 under the name ‘teapotuberhacker’. Kurtaj was recently sentenced to an indefinite hospital stay by a British judge for hacking Rockstar and Uber.
Lapsus$: the hacker group is back in the news.
Known cyberattacks attributed to the group include Uber, Microsoft, Rockstar Games, Okta, Nvidia, Mercado Libre, T-Mobile, Ubisoft, Vodafone and Samsung. As part of these attacks, threat actors tried to extort companies not to disclose stolen data, which was often source code and customer data. Since the arrest of some of its members, the Lapsus$ group had not been very active; it is believed that some of them are now active in the hacking collective known as Scattered Spider.
