Hackers have stolen some 1.6 terabytes of data from Marvel’s Spider-Man studio Insomniac and have now published it on the web.
In what must be a grim moment for employees at the studio, Marvel’s Spider-Man developer Insomniac has had a huge batch of data stolen by hackers and published on the web.
The data breach itself occurred last week, when a group of hackers calling itself Ryhsida broke into the studio’s servers and took around 1.67 terabytes of sensitive information. The group then demanded $2m in bitcoins from Insomniac; when the studio refused to pay up, Rhysida published the data on the web – a tranche of around 1.3m files.
Those files include a roadmap of Insomniac’s upcoming games over the next decade, many of which are unannounced – IGN reports that the list includes Marvel’s Venom, scheduled for 2025, Wolverine, due the following year, a third Spider-Man game for 2028, and an X-Men title in 2030. There are also said to be internal emails, art assets, and, perhaps most worryingly of all for those involved, the personal information on Insomniac staff.
The story was first broken by Cyber Daily, which has contacted the hackers involved for comment. A member of the group said that it had deliberately targeted Insomniac – owned by Sony – describing it as “an easy target” and boasting that it had managed to perform the hack in around “20-25 minutes.”
In a statement to Eurogamer, Sony said, “We are currently investigating this situation. We have no reason to believe that any other SIE or Sony divisions have been impacted.”
Much like the hack that struck Sony Pictures in 2014, the amount of data stolen is so huge that it’s likely to be picked over for news stories and Reddit posts for some time to come.
More recently, Rockstar Games was itself the victim of a major hack which saw a huge amount of behind-the-scenes data and information about Grand Theft Auto 6 leak out into the public domain. The breach was considered so serious that the FBI got involved; it’s likely that similar investigations into Insomniac’s hack will be getting started even as we write this.
