Rockstar Games, the developer behind the Grand Theft Auto series, has been targeted by a hacker group for the second time in three years. The group, calling itself ShinyHunters, claims to have accessed a third-party server and has given the company until 14 April 2026 to enter ransom negotiations, threatening to leak the stolen data if demands are not met.
“Rockstar Games. Your … data was compromised … Pay or leak,” the group posted on its leak site. ShinyHunters has previously claimed attacks on Microsoft, Cisco and Ticketmaster. The group is linked to the Com, a loose network of predominantly English-speaking cybercriminals aged 16 to 25, according to Aiden Sinnott, a principal threat researcher at Sophos.
Rockstar downplayed the incident in a statement, saying that “a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach” and that it had “no impact on our organisation or our players.” The company did not confirm whether any Grand Theft Auto VI data was involved, though the game’s details are tightly controlled.
The Grand Theft Auto series, made by Rockstar North in Edinburgh, is one of Britain’s biggest cultural exports, with Grand Theft Auto V and its online mode generating more than $8bn since 2013. Development costs for the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, delayed to 19 November this year, are estimated at close to $2bn.
This is not Rockstar’s first security breach. In 2022, 90 minutes of in-development GTA VI footage was leaked after a teenager from the Lapsus$ hacking collective broke into the company’s internal Slack channel. The perpetrator, Arion Kurtaj, was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in 2023, and Rockstar said the incident cost $5m and thousands of hours of staff time.
