A new report suggests that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Sunset Overdrive developer Insomniac Games has been hit by a ransomware attack.
According to Australian news platform Cyber Daily, the ransomware gang Rhysida has claimed to have “successfully hacked” Insomniac, posting “limited data” to back up its claim.
Cyber Daily alleges that the “limited data” posted by Rhysida as evidence for the attack includes a screenshot of Insomniac’s upcoming Wolverine game.
Other assets posted from that game include character art that could pertain to other Marvel characters appearing in the game. Naturally, we won’t be posting any of that material here.
As well as details pertaining to Wolverine, the hack also apparently includes passport scans for both current and former Insomniac employees, as well as a “personal document” belonging to Spider-Man voice actor Yuri Lowenthal.
This is all in addition to “internal emails and signed, confidential documents”, which Rhysida is allegedly also saying it has.
According to Cyber Daily, Rhysida has given Insomniac “seven days before the full data set is published”, during which time the group presumably wants an offer for the data from Insomniac.
An auction is also apparently being held, with bids starting at 50 bitcoins, which works out at around $2.09 million (at time of writing; the price of Bitcoin notoriously fluctuates regularly).
Insomniac isn’t the only studio to be hit by a ransomware attack in recent years. Other victims include Capcom and Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, as well as Ubisoft and Crytek.
It doesn’t seem that there’s any reason for anyone outside Insomniac to panic about this attack; as far as we know, the data allegedly stolen by Rhysida only includes internal employee information and current project data.
We reached out to Insomniac’s parent company Sony for comment about this story and a spokesperson gave us this statement:
We are aware of reports that Insomniac Games has been the victim of a cyber security attack. We are currently investigating this situation. We have no reason to believe that any other SIE or Sony divisions have been impacted.
