Last week, a group of cyber criminals claimed the theft of Epic Games' data, including source code and sensitive account information. The group was after $15,000 for the data, but Epic Games was quick to state at the time that they had found ‘no evidence' of a security breach. Now, it seems the bluff has been called and the ‘group' responsible has admitted to the attempted scam.
It turns out that the group's attempt to get $15,000 for roughly 200GB of ‘stolen' Epic Games data was just the tip of the ice burg in this plan. Speaking with Cyber Daily, the group states that if this first portion of the plan had been successful, it would then be able to convince hackers that it had the tools to break into high-profile company systems. From there, it would sell its fake ransomware tool to hackers.
Apparently, the mere claim that it hacked Epic Games drove the sale of its fake ransomware to around eight people. The group told CyberDaily that they see themselves as ‘professional fraudsters' and ‘criminal geniuses'.
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KitGuru Says: The claims seemed dubious at the time and now we seem to have confirmation, Epic Games has not been hacked. I'm sure Epic has spent some time double checking its security over the past few days though.