Insomniac Games, renowned for their award-winning Spider-Man titles and the upcoming Wolverine adventure, has been dealt a huge blow. The notorious Rhysida ransomware gang demanded a hefty $2 million ransom from Sony in exchange for their stolen secrets. Sony didn’t pay the ransom within seven days, so Rhysida released an entire terabyte of data from Insomniac games, including emails, prototype footage, and employees’ personal details.
As first reported by Cyberdaily, Sony launched a diligent investigation but did not pay the ransom. Over 1.67 terabytes of Insomniac’s internal data, a staggering 1.3 million files, flooded the internet’s dark corners. Some files are passports and other personal information about employees, which is sickening.
No company deserves something like this to happen, but that goes doubly for Insomniac Games. We just finished writing an article about how the company is fighting crunch by pushing PTO. They don’t hurt others and just want to make good games, but these hackers have chosen to target them.
“Yes, we knew who we were attacking. We knew that developers making games like this would be an easy target.”
Rhysida spokesperson
Rhysida seems to revel in the chaos, according to their statement to Cyberdaily. They claim Sony and Insomniac were chosen targets, easy prey for their cyber-predatory instincts. Apparently, the hack itself only took 20 minutes. Twenty minutes and tons of internal HR documents, from I-9 forms to termination notices, lay vulnerable. Screenshots of employee Slack channels and private conversations are all visible.
One of the most shocking discoveries was the contracts. A publishing agreement between Marvel and Sony revealed the existence of three X-Men games (the first being Wolverine) planned for the future. Wolverine may have been the immediate draw, but now Insomniac has lost their chance to reveal more X-Men games as a surprise.
The fallout from this digital heist is still unfolding, but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for Insomniac Games and Sony. However, this is only 98 percent of the documents stolen. The hacker group withheld 30 gigabytes, which may be the biggest part of the leak. Thirty Gigs is enough for a prototype or an in-development game, which is my guess, but it could be a whole lot worse.
We’ll have to see how this plays out, but we are nervous about what the last 2 percent may be.
