Rockstar Games blames hacker for major GTA 6 leak

Rockstar Games confirmed Monday that a “network intrusion” is to blame for a massive Grand Theft Auto 6 leak posted over the weekend. More than 90 video clips of the in-development game were published on a Grand Theft Auto forum — one of the largest leaks in video game history.

“We recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto,” a Rockstar representative said via Twitter on Monday.

The statement continued:

At this time, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects.

We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you in this way. Our work on the next Grand Theft Auto game will continue as planned and we remain as committed as ever to delivering an experience to you, our players, that truly exceeds your expectations. We will update everyone again soon, and, of course, will properly introduce you to this next game when it is ready. We want to thank everyone for their ongoing support through this situation.

The hacker, who also claimed responsibility for a breach at ride-sharing giant Uber last week, claimed to have downloaded the videos from Rockstar Games’ internal Slack, an application used for communication and file sharing between employees.

Nearly an hour’s worth of footage was published across the clips, some of which are very short. The clips showed two separate playable characters — a male and a female character — shooting guns and driving around what appears to be a fictionalized version of Miami, Vice City, further confirming a Bloomberg report from July. The longest clip features a female character, reportedly named Lucia, robbing a diner and holding diners and staff at gunpoint.

After publishing the first round of clips, the GTA 6 hacker, called Teapotuberhacker, said they intended to publish more, including a “test build” and source code for GTA 6 and its predecessor Grand Theft Auto 5. Later, the hacker said they were willing to “negotiate a deal” with Rockstar Games.