CD Projekt Red, the developer of Cyberpunk 2077, has been hit by a cyber attack, and the party responsible has reportedly stolen sensitive data and left a bizarre ransom note. Since the launch of its latest game, customers, shareholders, and staff have been upset about the game's development and CDPR's leadership. The game had a troubled development and launch, including allegations of crunch, a practice where game developers work significant amounts of overtime near the end of a game's development in order to release it by a particular date. Needless to say, the number of people that could be unhappy enough with the studio to pull off such a heinous act is not small.

After launch delays, the game's release prompted lawsuits over Cyberpunk's quality on previous-gen consoles. CDPR offered refunds for copies of the game bought at retail centers like GameStop. The problem became so bad that the Polish government now monitors the game's updates as well as how the company responds to upset consumers (CDPR is based in Poland). For a game that had a significant amount of hype and excitement surrounding it - particularly after the phenomenal success of  The Witcher series - Cyberpunk 2077 has managed to hurt its own popularity thanks to bad management and poor development practices.

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This morning, publisher CD Projekt released a statement reporting that it has been hit by a cyber attack that compromised its data and systems. CD Projekt says that the attacker "gained unauthorized access to [its] internal network," taking a variety of data that belonged to the developer and leaving a ransom note in their wake. The company says that it is still investigating the circumstances of the attack and that it will not negotiate with the attacker or give in to their demands. Perhaps most importantly for players, CD Projekt stated that, to the best of its knowledge, "the compromised systems did not contain any personal data of our players or users of our services." However, as seen with other recent game industry data breaches, that claim's validity may not be clear for some time.

The attacker left a ransom note in CD Projekt's systems, claiming to have stolen the full source code for versions of Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, and Gwent. They also claimed to have taken documents "relating to accounting, administration, legal, HR, investor relations, and more." It appears as though the attacker was more interested in gaining access to CDPR's internal documents rather than leaking or selling player data, leading some to speculate the responsible party is a player or developer upset with the state of the game or the circumstances of its creation. At this time, CDPR has not released any information about the attacker's identity, but they are working with "the relevant authorities" to gain more information.

Regardless of a player's feelings toward the state of Cyberpunk 2077, attacking a company by stealing its documents and source code is not the way to go about expressing one's discontent. The people who will suffer the most from this incident are not CD Projekt management, as the attacker may have hoped, but its developers and staff, who put a significant amount of time and effort into these games only to see them stolen and potentially leaked through illegitimate means.

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Source: CD Projekt Red (Twitter)