Epic Games ‘hackers’ admit threat of leak was phony

An alleged hack of Epic Games was revealed, by the “hackers” in question, to be fake. Last week, a ransomware group claimed to have made off with 200GB of unspecified data from Epic Games, with the presumption being that it planned to extort money from the company. However, the group has now said that it doesn’t actually have such data, and was trying to pull a con on the company.

The group, called Mogilevich, apparently demanded $15,000 from Epic in exchange for the data. Epic Games themselves didn’t respond to the alleged hack at the time. A spokesperson later told Eurogamer that the group didn’t contact the company directly, and the first they saw of it was a tweet from a third-party reporting the sum. “We are investigating but there is currently zero evidence that these claims are legitimate.”

Cyber Daily has an alleged confession from a Mogilevich spokesperson, who claimed the group was not comprised of hackers but scam artists. They also claim to have pulled this trick before with other companies. “Now the real question is? Why confess all this when we could just run away? This was done to illustrate the process of our scam. We don’t think of ourselves as hackers but rather as criminal geniuses, if you can call us that.” Cyber Daily acknowledges, as does GamesBeat, that this confession could also inflated or ficticious.

Hacks and potential leaks are a serious topic in the games industry, particularly with the recent — and successful — hacks of Insomniac Games and Rockstar. In both of those cases, the data stolen, which included confidential employee information and unreleased game footage, was revealed to the public with damaging effects. In October, Europol apprehended the hacker group responsible for the 2020 Capcom breach.