

As well as the videos, which have already been posted to YouTube as proof of the attack, he claims to have source code for GTA 5 and GTA 6 development builds, and appears to be blackmailing the developer for it. In Rockstar’s case, the hacker seems to want to shake down the company. But the Rockstar hack appears less serious than the Uber attack, which involved the attacker gaining administrative access to the entire network, even being able to control the initial response to the hack itself through total control of the Slack account.

In both cases, the messaging app Slack was a major point of entry, where it’s likely that information shared between staff members was used to gain further access to sensitive data. Teapotuberhacker also claims responsibility for a recent Uber data breach, and the techniques used appear similar. The 90 videos were posted there, he says, and were easily downloaded. The hacker says the footage was obtained by breaking into Rockstar’s Slack channel, the communication platform used for internal collaboration. GTA publisher Take-Two Interactive has acknowledged the leak, and has been sending takedown requests to YouTube under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, affirming that the company holds the copyright to the posted footage. Yes, according to our sources – and besides, it would be difficult to fake the sheer quantity of work involved without devoting significant resources. The scene is voice-acted and fluidly animated, but still unpolished, with character models and scenery having none of the detail expected from a finished game.Įven given the unfinished nature of the clips, with debug commands and technical information overlaid, the leaked footage appears to confirm many reported details about the game, including the presence of a female playable character in the single-player campaign for the first time, and the setting of modern-day Vice City, the GTA world’s equivalent of Miami, which featured in 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

In one, a female player character holds up a diner, pointing a pistol at the cashier who places stacks of dollars on the counter, before the player picks up the money and moves on. In others, characters alternately walk and run to test animation progressions. Some of the footage is simple short clips of animation tests: one such video shows a figure leaning out of the window of a car armed with a rifle, aiming in a smooth circle. A large amount of clearly work-in-progress gameplay, from all stages of development.
