Rockstar Games, the developer behind the widely anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI video game, confirmed the news on Monday that it had been hacked and that data was stolen from it. The company maintained that this theft would have "no impact" on its operations or its playerbase.
This is the second time, the company has faced a data breach of such a scale, with the game having suffered a similar hack in 2022, NDTV Profit covers the timeline of the two incidents as well as the impact they had.
April 2026 ShinyHunters Incident
Cybersecurity reports had earlier sited a post on the dark web by the hacker group 'ShinyHunters' who claimed to have hacked the company's 'Snowflake' cloud hosting servers. The group demanded a ransom from the company, threatening to leak all the data they collected by April 14, if Rockstar refused to comply.
The company stated that the data the was stolen was "non-material" in nature and was accessed in connection to a third-party data breach. “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," a spokesperson from the company told Kotaku.
According to reports, the hacker group accessed the data by hacking the third party cloud cost-monitoring software Anodot, that Rockstar was using rather than direclty targeting the company's Snowflake servers.
The data is presumed to consist of Rockstar Games' corporate information rather than sensitive player data and passwords, with the group likely having access to marketing plans, contracts and financial documents, which the firm would most likely not want to see being circulated publicly.
ShinyHunters has also previously targeted tech giants like Microsoft and Google along with other notable firms such as Ticketmaster, Cisco, AT&T and Wattpad as well as Indian firms such as Aditya Birla Fashion And Retail Ltd.
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September 2022 Hack
Arion Kurtaj, an 18-year old hacker hacked the company in September 2022 and stole material related to the early development of the company's upcoming title 'Grand Theft Auto VI'. This included data, source code and video clips of unfinished game footage.
The game which has been highly anticipated since the release of its predecessor 'Grand Theft Auto V' in 2013, had 90-minute long clips of its gameplay leak on public forums by hacker Arion Kurtaj, who was then issued an indefinite hospital order by a court.
Kurtaj used an Amazon Fire stick, a TV and a mobile phone to undertake the hack and broke into the firm's Slack messaging channels to threaten to release the game's source code.
This did not seem to significantly impact the game development as the footage was from early in the development cycle and was not enough to leak any significant story or gameplay details.
November 2025 Firings
Rockstar Games fired close to 40 employees according to news reports from November 2025 for "distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum" which it deemed a violation of it company policies. The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) had alleged that the company was engaging in union-busting, with President Alex Marshall stating that the staff were targeted for attempting to organise a union.
Rockstar Games denied the claims and stated that "this was in no way related to people's right to join a union or engage in union activities.”
ALSO READ: Rockstar Fires Staff Over GTA 6 Leaks As Take Two Interactive's Earnings Call Draws Spotlight
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