Electronic Arts (EA) have fallen victim to a cyber attack where they have had valuable information stolen.
The large games publisher are one of the biggest in the industry creating some of the largest games franchises such as The Sims, Titanfall, Star Wars Battlefield and FIFA which are respectively played y million around the world.
The cyber attackers claimed to have downloaded the source code for some of the popular games listed above and also for their in game engine Frostbite which is used to create multiple other games. The files downloaded apparently add up to 780GB which is a considerable amount hen factoring in that a majority of it is just code.
Source code is a very valuable data due to it being a more easily understandable version of the end code that makes up Video Games when released. This means that it can be sold to competitors very easily as they could revere engineer parts of the game to harness valuable information.
Although a mainstream competitor would never risk purchasing this data and exploiting it, due to how easy it would be to figure out by EA and the press, individuals however could use this code to exploit the game by implementing bugs and cheats to the live service of the game for personal gain or disruption. The Frostbite engine for example is used to create dozens of high profile games and therefore one person could cause damage to multiple games through this.
This attack is one of many in a latest sting of cyber crimes where hackers are targeting high profile gaming companies such as CD Projekt Red in February were they stole source code including Cyberpunk, and the Capcom back in November 2020 where they fell victim to a ransomware attack leaking 350,000 peoples personal information who played Resident Evil and Street Fighter.