One of the most anticipated games set to come out set in a cyberpunk universe is CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. However, it has recently undergone a conundrum. According to a recent notice published on Twitter for folks, gamers, fans of the franchise and journalists to read, is news that a “cyber thief” retrieved old WIP (work in progress) data of Cyberpunk 2077 and is holding it ransom.

As one would expect, this news has stirred up a lot of people to think that this is all a publicity stunt and others to think that this is straight up a cyber hack that has put the company in a pickle. Before jumping into all the hoopla, let’s take a look at what the company has posted up on Twitter regarding the old data pertaining to Cyberpunk 2077 being held ransom.

Dear gamers,

 

An unidentified individual or individuals have just informed us they are in possession of a few internal files belonging to CD Projekt RED. Among them are documents connected to early designs for the upcoming game, Cyberpunk 2077.

 

A demand for ransom has been made, saying that we should not comply, the files will be released to the general public. We will not be giving in to the demands of the individual or individuals that have contacted us, which might eventually lead to the files being published online. The appropriate legal authorities will be informed about the situation.

 

The documents are old and largely unrepresentative of the current vision for the game. Still, if you’re looking forward to playing Cyberpunk 2077, it would be best for you to avoid any information not coming directly from CD Projekt RED.

 

When the time is right, you will hear about Cyberpunk 2077 from us — officially.

 

CD Projekt RED Team

This isn’t the first time the company has been hacked regarding Cyberpunk 2077 — if we look at this current event as being true — we can trace back to December 14th, 2016, where the old forum board was breached, but luckily due to an upgrade to the forum engine no personal information was compromised. That specific hack event that went down can be read about below.

Dear forum users,

 

Upon examining the data at our disposal, we can conclude that an unauthorized party gained access to the old forum database.

 

At the time of the event, the database was not in active use, as forum members had been asked to create better-secured GOG.com accounts almost a year earlier. The forum engine has also been upgraded since then to the newest and most secure version, fixing the exploit that allowed said access.

 

It is our understanding that the obsolete forum database contained usernames, email addresses and salted MD5 passwords (MD5 is an encryption algorithm we used to encrypt your data). This means your old passwords were secured and not directly accessible by anyone.

 

However, it is still a best practice to ask users to change their passwords. Since the event, we’ve conducted additional external security tests and we will double our efforts to ensure such situations don’t occur in the future.

 

In the following days, we will send out emails to affected users notifying them about the situation.

 

We would like to deeply apologize everyone affected.

The latter notice reads just like the former or most recent hack, which makes the former seem legit and not like a publicity stunt by CDPR.

However, I can understand where folks can see how this new hack could look like a publicity stunt. Additionally, during this years, which is supposedly to be the year of GWENT, we recently got a lot of talk about Cyberpunk 2077 in that there is an Event Manager for the game to appear at major game conventions, a promotional campaign set in motion that will be a surprise, and that the team will be “pulling out all the stops” around the time Mike Pondsmith noted that something big is going down, which all comes just right near E3.

To be honest here, I’m going to hold my tongue as to whether this event is a publicity stunt or if it is real, but what I will say is that hopefully progress goes excellent on Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR doesn’t face anymore detrimental threats, and that the game comes out according to plan.

With all of that said, what’s your thoughts on this most recent hack?