Rockstar has acknowledged the recently recognized Grand Theft Auto Online exploit and has committed to fixing it.
On Twitter the official Rockstar Support account shared this message:
“We are aware of potential new exploits in GTA Online for PC, which we aim to resolve in an upcoming planned security-related Title Update.
If you think you might have experienced any related issues, please reach out to Rockstar Support.”
The exploit started getting noticed by fans a few days before. It allows cheaters to add, remove, and/or modify your stats remotely. Your data can even be permanently corrupted, leading to players’ accounts getting banned or deleted.
Rockstar Games was aware of this exploit before they shared this message. But they have not shared a full explanation of what is going on with the game, likely because they are themselves in the middle of examining it.
This is not the first time Grand Theft Auto Online had been hacked. In fact, earlier on, Rockstar Games had a no tolerance policy to all kinds of hacks and mods.
That stance has softened as more players made it distinctly clear they were playing with mods just to add to their experience of the game, and were not messing with variables like Grand Theft Auto Online’s monetization, or other player’s gameplay experiences.
To be clear, these mods really still do break Rockstar’s own Grand Theft Auto Online rules about mods and hacks, but the company has decided to tolerate them, after taking the legal issues into account. In fact, very recently they released a directive that banned NFTs in fans’ roleplay servers. By implication, Rockstar were well aware and were in fact monitoring the Grand Theft Auto Online roleplay servers, made so that players can live out the life of being an NPC in the online world of the game.
These new hacks, of course, more closely bring to mind a different kind of exploit. The now infamous Grand Theft Auto 6 hacker, who leaked early production materials from the game, also happens to have sold the source code of Grand Theft Auto 5. It is entirely possible that this leak of the source code is what enabled this new exploit to happen, and there may be a direct line traced to this original leaker, and the hacker at work now. Unfortunately, this may also not be the last of the hacks and exploits the game will be receiving. We will have to wait and see if Rockstar can nip all of this in the bud.
