It's been a rough few months for Cyberpunk 2077 and its developer, CD Projekt Red. The rough launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was only the beginning of the story. Since then, the company has had to contend with angry fans, falling stock prices, litigious investors, and sometimes patches that made the game even worse.
On top of that, CD Projekt Red had to deal with disgruntled hackers who broke into the company's servers, installed ransomware, and threatened to share all data online.
The information came from CD Projekt Red, which probably wanted to inform fans before the hacker. The company posted a detailed description of the situation and a (poorly written) ransom note from the hacker on Twitter.
"An unidentified person gained unauthorized access to our internal network, collected certain data belonging to the CD Projekt capital group and left a ransom note with content that we will make public," the company said." We will not give in to the demands and we will not negotiate with the actors." "We recognize that this could ultimately lead to the release of the compromised data."
As bad as this may sound, there are two redeeming features. First, the installation of the ransomware was not as devastating as the hackers had hoped; CD Projekt's backup drives were unaffected, so if there was any data loss, the company appears to have minimized it.
Second, CD Projekt assured fans that "the compromised system does not contain any personal data of our players or service users."
Good news for gamers who have not purchased Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt also operates the GOG Game Store platform and the GOG Galaxy launcher service.
As for the note itself, the hacker claims to have complete copies of the source code for Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, and Gwent (a stand-alone card game based on The Witcher). They also claim to have "documents related to accounting, administration, legal, human resources, investor relations, etc.," which may be a bigger problem.
Distributing the source code of a game may make it easier to pirate the title, but you can't actually modify it and sell it, and nothing in it would be very interesting to the layman.
On the other hand, for business documents, hackers have threatened to "send them to their contacts in game journalism," presumably in the hope that some wrongdoing will come to light. While it is unlikely that any reputable journalist would receive the stolen documents, it would be a daunting task for a tabloid-style publication to go through them.
In any case, the hackers have given CD Projekt 48 hours to respond. While hacking a large company and revealing confidential data may be in the spirit of the cyberpunk genre, the driving force here seems to be malice rather than public interest.
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