Source code from Grand Theft Auto 5 has partially leaked online.
This comes nearly two months after the hacker teapot was brought to court for hacking and leaking parts of Grand Theft Auto 6. At the time, it came to light that the hacker also got his hands on the code for Grand Theft Auto 5. Teapot gave the code to someone else, and in fact the code could have been purchased. That person then allegedly was looking for someone else to buy the code, but at the time it did not seem that there were any takers.
As we had discussed at the time, the value of Grand Theft Auto 5’s source code is limited, but it is still there. All the way back seven years ago, a modder did manage to gain access to the game’s files. This enabled a few years of mods for and even Grand Theft Auto Online, although the latter did come with a lot of risk for players who dared to try it knowing the consequences for getting caught. For many years it has already been Rockstar policy that any player caught modding or cheating on Grand Theft Auto Online would be banned permanently.
Our source discusses the possibility of fans releasing confidential information from the game’s development to the public, or the possibility that fans would make fan games using this code, but there’s actually a third, more insidious possibility.
Through three console generations and multiple platforms, Grand Theft Auto Online has collected a lot of user data, including identifiable data that helped players migrate between those platforms, and possibly payment data. As we have seen, hackers did find and leak footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 as a work in progress. We also know that these hackers used social engineering along the way to get access to these files.
Social engineering has also been the modern method of choice for hackers to infiltrate financial systems, including no less than Google and Facebook themselves. Rockstar Games is definitely rushing to plug this security breach as it could lead to a large-scale financial hack, of Rockstar Games itself, their parent company Take-Two Interactive, or possibly their userbase.
It’s unfortunate that this source code is linked to this real world risk, as there would also be a public interest in preserving that source code, for the sake of game preservation. Video game companies themselves haven’t done a good job of preserving even their own recent games, and it may have to be a broader initiative undertaken outside the industry to do this work. That this even happened is likely to make Rockstar Games reticent in sharing that code, or the code for their other games, in the future.
Source: GameRant
