I was in federal prison with Sebastien Raoult, one of the ShinyHunters guys. We were in the same unit and talked regularly.
I was about mid-way through my bid when another inmate told me "new guy in B3 is a another hacker." I got really excited—I'd have someone to talk shop with, at the very least.
My takeaway from him was that they're a bunch of contemporary "script kiddies" with a lot of time on their hands.
Update: 4/11/26, 11:45 a.m. ET: Rockstar Games confirmed that a data breach has happened. A spokesperson sent over this statement to Kotaku:
“We can confirm that a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach. This incident has no impact on our organization or our players.”
> “Rockstar Games, your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay or leak. This is a final warning to reach out by 14 Apr 2026 before we leak, along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.”
Anyone familiar with "Snowflake" enough to say what sort of data was typically hosted there? Judging by the website and the lack of specifics about the data, I'm guessing it's less about assets, artifacts and stuff like that, and more about financial data and general/generic "business" stuff?
Sure, but some databases are sold/bought more by brand recognition and for the type of data rather than actual technical capabilities. Don't ask me why, just very familiar with people making those sort of choices.
Most I would say, but with snowflake it can be anything from some exec's fever dream to them actually paying 10x what they should and accomplishing said fever dream; I've worked on the entire spectrum when it comes to Snowflake.
Snowflake is typically used for data analytics in my experience. It's going to have financial stuff very likely, but not like raw documents. Definitely not source code.
I mean technically you can stuff documents into a column with the BINARY datatype provided they are under 67 MB each, but it's not really meant to be used as a document store.
Rockstar Games Hacked, Hackers Threaten a Massive Data Leak If Not Paid Ransom
This is just my opinion but that is not much of a threat and I think they should ignore it. Rockstars social platform has always had abhorrent security and players have always been able to easily doxx one another, know where other players live, boot each other out of games to the point of requiring multiple mod-menus just to be in a multi-player lobby in my experience thus extortion of money for player data from snowflake is just redundant.
I honestly expected the demand to be "Release GTA 6 soon or else we will". ...The fact that they're just demanding money is a little disappointing. ;-)
Coincidentally and Interestingly, again, I was reading an old thread from 2015 titled - ProtonMail pays $6k ransom, gets taken out by DDoS anyway
The top comment says -
"NEVER EVER PAY RANSOM MONEY.
Please. Even if your business will suffer it will suffer a lot more if you do pay since now it is known you'll cave. Also: you are making the problem larger for others."
The top response to that comment says -
"From their blog: https://protonmaildotcom.wordpress.com/
At around 2PM, the attackers began directly attacking the infrastructure of our upstream providers and the datacenter itself. The coordinated assault on our ISP exceeded 100Gbps and attacked not only the datacenter, but also routers in Zurich, Frankfurt, and other locations where our ISP has nodes. This coordinated assault on key infrastructure eventually managed to bring down both the datacenter and the ISP, which impacted hundreds of other companies, not just ProtonMail.
At this point, we were placed under a lot of pressure by third parties to just pay the ransom, which we grudgingly agreed to do at 3:30PM Geneva time to the bitcoin address 1FxHcZzW3z9NRSUnQ9Pcp58ddYaSuN1T2y. This was a collective decision taken by all impacted companies, and while we disagree with it, we nevertheless respected it taking into the consideration the hundreds of thousands of Swiss Francs in damages suffered by other companies caught up in the attack against us. We hoped that by paying, we could spare the other companies impacted by the attack against us, but the attacks continued nevertheless. This was clearly a wrong decision so let us be clear to all future attackers – ProtonMail will NEVER pay another ransom. "
they should just leak the game, rockstar should take the opportunity to create gta7 by training AI using gta6 and then making lifelike visuals. would be better.
66 comments
I was about mid-way through my bid when another inmate told me "new guy in B3 is a another hacker." I got really excited—I'd have someone to talk shop with, at the very least.
My takeaway from him was that they're a bunch of contemporary "script kiddies" with a lot of time on their hands.
This tracks.
https://kotaku.com/gta-6-hacker-sentenced-prison-life-185111...
def curious to hear your story if you’re willing to share
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844197
Might even be a goofy thing to tell the truth about!
“We can confirm that a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach. This incident has no impact on our organization or our players.”
> “Rockstar Games, your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay or leak. This is a final warning to reach out by 14 Apr 2026 before we leak, along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.”
Anyone familiar with "Snowflake" enough to say what sort of data was typically hosted there? Judging by the website and the lack of specifics about the data, I'm guessing it's less about assets, artifacts and stuff like that, and more about financial data and general/generic "business" stuff?
I mean technically you can stuff documents into a column with the BINARY datatype provided they are under 67 MB each, but it's not really meant to be used as a document store.
This is just my opinion but that is not much of a threat and I think they should ignore it. Rockstars social platform has always had abhorrent security and players have always been able to easily doxx one another, know where other players live, boot each other out of games to the point of requiring multiple mod-menus just to be in a multi-player lobby in my experience thus extortion of money for player data from snowflake is just redundant.
The top comment says -
"NEVER EVER PAY RANSOM MONEY. Please. Even if your business will suffer it will suffer a lot more if you do pay since now it is known you'll cave. Also: you are making the problem larger for others."
The top response to that comment says -
"From their blog: https://protonmaildotcom.wordpress.com/ At around 2PM, the attackers began directly attacking the infrastructure of our upstream providers and the datacenter itself. The coordinated assault on our ISP exceeded 100Gbps and attacked not only the datacenter, but also routers in Zurich, Frankfurt, and other locations where our ISP has nodes. This coordinated assault on key infrastructure eventually managed to bring down both the datacenter and the ISP, which impacted hundreds of other companies, not just ProtonMail.
At this point, we were placed under a lot of pressure by third parties to just pay the ransom, which we grudgingly agreed to do at 3:30PM Geneva time to the bitcoin address 1FxHcZzW3z9NRSUnQ9Pcp58ddYaSuN1T2y. This was a collective decision taken by all impacted companies, and while we disagree with it, we nevertheless respected it taking into the consideration the hundreds of thousands of Swiss Francs in damages suffered by other companies caught up in the attack against us. We hoped that by paying, we could spare the other companies impacted by the attack against us, but the attacks continued nevertheless. This was clearly a wrong decision so let us be clear to all future attackers – ProtonMail will NEVER pay another ransom. "
Full thread here -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523583
So many new toys and ways to scam or extort people. And so many potential innovations to explore as well lol.