Amidst chaos caused by the Insomniac hack, Ubisoft is the next victim of hackers targeting the gaming industry.
The Assassin’s Creed developer has allegedly suffered a data breach as screenshots of its internal software programs like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Confluence surface online. The images were first seen on vx-underground, an open-source community site that features the world’s largest collection of malware source code, samples, and papers online.
According to vx-underground, the security of Ubisoft was compromised by an ‘unknown threat actor’ on Dec 20, 2023. The individual responsible for the hack reportedly had access to the company’s internal records for almost 48 hours and aimed to exfiltrate around 900 GBs of confidential data.
It is currently unclear exactly what type of data was being sought by the perpetrator. Vx-underground reported that the perpetrator audited various internal communication portals used by the company’s employees, reviewed the user access rights, and tried to (unsuccessfully) exfiltrate user data for Rainbow Six Siege.
Roughly 48 hours after the perpetrator gained access to Ubisoft’s confidential servers, their presence was flagged by the administration and their access was revoked.
In a statement made to BleepingComputer, Ubisoft claimed that they were aware of the ‘alleged’ data security breach and were in the process of investigating. At the time of writing this article, Ubisoft has yet to confirm if it indeed was a security breach. I have reached out to them for comments.
Security breaches in game development companies are sadly becoming commonplace. This year was many such incidents, including the Insomniac Games hack that revealed Wolverine gameplay, or last year’s Rockstar Games hack.
If this recent security breach does indeed prove to be legitimate, it would mark the third major security breach for Ubisoft, following the breach of 2020 by the Egregor Ransomware Gang that leaked portions of the Watch Dogs games’ source code. Another breach for Ubisoft occurred in March 2022 that caused major disruptions in the company’s services, online games, and systems.
