A gang of hackers named "ransomware" Egregor attacked video game companies on Tuesday night Ubisoft e Crytek, stealing and encrypting a lot of data and codes of the two companies, threatening to make them public in case their ransom demand is not accepted. A small part of the stolen material has already been published on their private portal in the dark web, where there are also several files concerning Watch Dogs: Legion, due out on October 29th, and which hackers presumably also own the source code, intimidating the French production house to publish it completely if the ransom was not paid in time.
Ransomware groups usually act in a similar way to that implemented by Egregor: first of all they breach sites, steal the most important data, encrypt them and finally they directly threaten companies by asking for a sum of moneyotherwise they will all release their sensitive content to the mercy of the web. Furthermore, to prove the success of their attack, a small part of their "stolen goods" is usually published on a special site, to show everyone - and especially the targeted companies - that their shot has actually hit the mark. Very often these forcing are stopped in the bud by the various protection systems and when the files are extracted the hackers are kicked out of the site, unable to decrypt the data in time, but it would seem that this time the Egregor group is actually in possession of sensitive codes and data.
For now Ubisoft and Crytek do not seem to want to respond to requests for explanations on this matter. On the other hand, we have an opinion of the hackers themselves, thanks to a brief exchange made with the guys from the ZDNet portal, who revealed that as far as the French software house is concerned, they only managed to copy the Watch Dogs: Legion files, remembering once again that if they are not contacted they will release the entire source code on the web. As for Crytek, however, the files were entirely stolen and encrypted. For now, no amount of money has been explicitly requested by Egregor, which in any case intends to release even more data over the next few days if they really do not receive replies from the two companies.