1.3-Million Insomniac Files Leaked

It’s all leaks, all the time this month, apparently. Between Rocksteady’s need to ask players to avoid the spoilers for its upcoming title Kill the Justice League, another story has been brewing under this. You may have heard that a group called Rhysida had ransomed a large amount of data from the studio behind the recent Spider-Man titles and of course Ratchet and Clank. Well, the ransomware deadline has passed, and according to Cyber Daily, more than a terabyte of Insomniac’s data (98% of it) has been released.

According to the Australian publication, it is 1.3 million files and 1.67 terabytes of data, the majority of which are to do with Insomniac and the upcoming Wolverine game that the studio is working on. This data includes images and material for the Wolverine game, some of Spider-Man 2, internal documents such as screenshots of Slack, and even HR documents. Very little of which I think anyone outside of Sony and Insomniac really cares too much about.

What should and probably does interest fans of Insomniac is the details on who has the X-Men license in gaming for the next while. In the leaks is a document that includes Isaac Perlmutter’s (Marvel’s chairperson of entertainment) and Jim Ryan’s (SIE President and CEO) signature; the document itself is an agreement between Sony and Marvel to create three X-Men games between July 26th, 2021, and December 2033. With the overall deal with Marvel (such as Spider-Man) ending in 2035, according to IGN.

Meanwhile, Polygon reports (with awful editing) that the leak includes details on other PlayStation studios, such as Guerrilla Games and Bluepoint Games. Returning to the points stated by Cyber Daily, the leaks detail that Sony is expecting to spend at least $120 Million on each of its X-Men titles. The Rhysida group behind the leak announced their intentions on the 12th of December, asking for a “simple” $2 Million from any bidder. According to the group, only 2% of the data was sold, with the comment “Not sold [sic] data was uploaded, data hunters, enjoy.”

Cyber Daily contacted the group via email and received some interesting details from a Rhysida spokesperson. “Yes, we knew who we were attacking […] We knew that developers making games like this would be an easy target.” On how difficult it was to obtain access, the spokesperson said: “We were able to get the domain administrator within 20–25 minutes of hacking the network.” Industry professionals and studios have issued statements in support of Insomniac, including Remedy and God of War creative director, Cory Barlog.