Ubisoft, a French video game firm, has revealed that a cyber security breach caused various games, systems, and services to be momentarily unavailable. The event was discovered after a data breach at Nvidia, a leading American graphics chip company, and Samsung, a South Korean conglomerate, earlier this month.

Ubisoft stated its IT teams were investigating the problem with the help of prominent external specialists. Multiple Ubisoft users reported problems accessing their Ubisoft service last week, prompting the announcement.

Headquartered in Montreuil with its studios around the world, the game maker has repeatedly produced hit titles including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, For Honor, Just Dance, Prince of Persia, Rabbids, Rayman, Tom Clancy’s, and Watch Dogs.

“As a precautionary measure we initiated a company-wide password reset. Also, we can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident,” it said in a statement late on Friday.

While Ubisoft has not named the attacker, The Verge reports that Lapsus$ has taken the blame on its own in a Telegram channel reportedly operated by LAPSUS$. To someone who provided the link to the publication’s piece.

the hacker gang responded with a smirk. This appears to be the second recent hack by Lapsus$, and it is unclear whether the gang will target additional businesses in the future.

Data breach at Samsung and Nvidia

Hackers also gained access to sensitive data from Samsung, a South Korean technology giant, including source code for multiple Samsung Galaxy devices, during the same attack.

According to a report by bleepingcomputer.com, the Lapsus$ organization allegedly exposed a “large collection of secret data they claim to be from Samsung Electronics” on March 4, 2022.

According to the hacker gang, it has 190GB of data from Samsung that it took while collecting 1TB of data from Nvidia’s computers.

On March 1, Nvidia confirmed that employee passwords and proprietary information had been exposed by hackers. The business stated, “We have no proof of ransomware being distributed on the Nvidia environment or that this is tied to the Russia-Ukraine crisis.”

After stealing over a terabyte of data, the group demanded that Nvidia open-source its drivers and chip design. When Nvidia declined, the gang leaked the DLSS source code, as well as the personal details of over 70,000 present and former workers and Nvidia’s security certificates, allowing other hackers to create malware-infected phone drivers.

On March 7, Samsung announced that hackers had stolen internal business data as well as source code for Galaxy smartphones. “There has been no personal data breach,” Samsung stated flatly, “but leaked information contains some source codes required to function the Galaxy phones.”

Other significant ransomware attacks

• Apart from these three organizations, cyber-attacks have lately targeted Mercado Libre and a number of large Canadian banks. This week, the Argentinian e-commerce behemoth Mercado Libre disclosed “unauthorized access” to a portion of its source code.
• Threat actors allegedly gained access to the data of about 300,000 of Mercado’s users, according to the company. The announcement comes after a survey by the data extortion group Lapsus$, which threatened to disclose data allegedly obtained from Mercado and other companies.
• Customers were unable to access online and mobile banking, as well as e-transfers, for several hours when major Canadian banks went offline. Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), BMO (Bank of Montreal), Scotiabank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) are among the banks apparently affected by the outage.
• Ubisoft has 117 million active gamers as of October, according to the company’s latest quarterly report. While the game does not require an internet connection to play, it does require the save file to be synced before it can be launched, which is not possible because the server is down.

Hopefully, the problem will be resolved soon, allowing fans to return to their favourite Ubisoft games.

published by: Aditya Andharia 

Edited By: Khushi Thakur