Let me fetch my Violin
Cybersecurity, the basis of many an instructional video and a topic being bought up with more and more frequency every passing day. If it isn't some huge company being blackmailed for bitcoin it's some even larger municipality breach that causes blackouts over half a city, or several cities in some cases. Just like the classic Ubisoft videogame Watch_Dogs, only if it actually lived up to the hype Ubisoft set for each entry. (We won't be 'hacking the planet' in those games anytime soon.) The message is clear, more and more the importance of staying cyber secure is ramping up as more nefarious parties conjure up new and exciting ways to breach into private data. Imagine the 90's race against virus's, only if the threat really was as scary as shysters like John McAfee and the like successfully make it out to be. And the best part of this virtual arms race? No one can be bothered to take the required Cybersecurity steps that they should. I can't. I'll bet you can't. And company's who make their living doing the absolute bare minimum wherever possible, such as EA, certainly aren't going to be doing it.
Yeah, you know where this is going don't you? Seems Aiden Pearce and crew made a little stop off to the EA offices in order to abscond away with a stupid amount of Data that they then went and tried to blackmail the company with. If this is given you any slight nagging of Deja Vu, that'll be because this exact same thing happened earlier on in the year with CD Projekt Red and the Source Code for Cyberpunk. Of course, they chose not to give into the hackers and nothing too bad came out of th- oh wait, somewhere in the source code it was discovered that CDPR had labelled all content that had to be censored for China with 'Winnie the Pooh'? Okay that's hilarious, but it also likely has cost them all future business in the entirety of China, or at least until their current head of state is replaced by someone without the self esteem of a highschooler. But EA aren't going to be that stupid, so what's the worst that could happen?
Well my suspicions were first raised when EA came out and assured everyone that there was no danger to players whatsoever. Which knowing EA probably means that the hackers have everything from EA player's home addresses to their banking details; they also claimed that the source code stolen doesn't hold any potential to hurt EA either, which is questionable. Okay, so apparently nothing that was taken is a danger to anyone? So EA just had 1.3 GB (once compressed) files worth of junk data lying around that some ne'er-do-well ran off with, presumably before checking the floppy disk and kicking a trash can whilst proclaiming "Curses! Foiled again. I'll get you next time, Andrew Wilson, Next time!" Who knew that EA were such Anime-level geniuses? You may pick up on the slight sarcasm in my tone and take that to mean I'm accusing EA of telling fibs, and I kind of am, but I'll believe them when they say the entire company isn't going to combust and fall apart from the hack. Sure enough.
Where I found myself utterly gobsmacked in this EA news, was where it was detailed that hackers tried to reach out to EA in order to demand a pay for the data back. First off, they tried to reach out through a third party they weren't associated with, obviously that wasn't going to work, what sort of reputation would be accrued by a company who goes around handing out ransom notes? Secondly, they tried to blackmail EA? Were they high? If ADVENT were to come to this timeline's Earth and start pulling off abductions, EA wouldn't even wait for the XCOM project to be activated, let alone for them to lose. EA CEO's would be selling off family members to the Aliens in order to curry favour and make a quick buck by the end of Week 1 at the latest. EA have no loyalties to any thing in this earthly existence beyond the mighty dollar bill. Who on earth thought they had a chance at blackmailing EA out of their money and where do I have to train to earn that level of numbskull confidence?
So enough of taking EA's word for things, what exactly was effected by this hack? Oh well, just the source code for Frostbite game engine. You know, the game engine that EA mandates all of their games must run on no matter how badly it fits the genre? Just that engine. No biggie. As well as the Source codes for Battlefield, (no idea which ones) Star Wars Squadrons and, surprise surprise, Fifa? Oh god, no matter which year's Fifa they got, these hackers will have the source for at least the next fifty years of Fifa games, get ready for Fifa Online to get even worse than it already is. (Hacks are coming) Oh, and as a little Easter egg tucked in there, to make anyone smile, apparently the Anthem Source code was nicked too. Wow, that's the most attention that code has gotten in years. Heck, if that makes it into the public maybe those Anthem loyalists can get ahold of it and make Anthem into a better game than EA could.
So I'll be honest with you, I couldn't really care less about EA in this story, they could have had their actual brains hacked off of their stems and I wouldn't shed a tear for those wastrels. What I think is more interesting is the trend of high profile hacks hitting game developers all over the place nowadays and the sort of trend which is being set up. I already mentioned Cyberpunk, but Capcom was hit with another big hack last year, which is how the existence of Dragon's Dogma 2 was revealed, alongside Nintendo, Valve and Ubisoft themselves. Now the sizes of these hacks vary, of course, but the result is still the same; confidence is being hurt across the board regarding the cyber savviness of an industry literally built around computers. If game companies can't keep out the hackers, who rightly can?
For the hackers themselves I'd imagine that what they seek is probably just a little fame and attention, because quite honestly no one in their right mind would expect to make a profit from an EA hack, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on. Keeping up a trend like this might really start to create an atmosphere of anxiety around the AAA studios, where people become actively worried that each new big release will attract some sort of Cyber attack. I know EA and friends have insisted that consumers aren't in trouble, and perhaps they're right about that this time; but all it takes is one unlucky hack to breach the wrong folder of some popular game and we could be looking at a catastrophe.
What I'm saying is that someone up in their multimillion dollar studios need to get it together, because I'm sitting here with shaken faith syndrome and I'm not even an investor. Most of these big names we see on the 'hacked' list are generating stupid money a month, EA in particular makes annual billions, is there any real excuse then why a group of basement-based hackers should be able to slip in their confidential files? Not really. But what do I know? From the way EA themselves have been spinning this lately, they make it sound like it's almost good for business to have this happen, so perhaps I'm just out of the loop and my depth on this topic. I'll admit that possibility. Or perhaps the gaming industry is proving itself to be easy targets for groups like this time and time again, and until something's done about it we'll be seeing more and more obstructing hacks until some form of, as of yet unknown, tipping point. Guess the Deep Web data-markets will decide when that happens, huh
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