Facts first: on November 4, 2020, less than a week after the launch of Watch Dogs: Legion, Ubisoft confirmed to Eurogamer that it was investigating a possible leak of the game’s source code. The material, which circulated on the internet, was 560 GB. “We are aware of the group’s allegation and are investigating a potential data security incident,” a company spokesperson said.
The group in question was Egregor, a ransomware gang. Translating the jargon: ransomware is malicious software that hijacks the data of a computer or network and demands payment to return it. Groups of this kind usually threaten to publish what they stole to pressure victims. In October 2020, Egregor had already released data it said it had obtained from the internal networks of Crytek, creator of Crysis, and of Ubisoft itself. The Legion code leak appeared right after.
The irony didn’t go unnoticed, and Eurogamer summed it up as “life imitating art”. Legion is a game about hackers: the DedSec group fights the surveillance regime of a private military company in a futuristic London, breaking into systems and stealing information.
What was at stake
In practice, a source code leak has two sides. The site DSOGaming pointed out that the material could pave the way for mods. The more serious risk was hackers using the code to break the game’s anti-piracy protections, something that, up to then, did not seem to have happened. For a company, exposed source code also means internal tools and development techniques in plain view of anyone.
What came next
The game kept getting updates: the online mode arrived in March 2021 and the Bloodline expansion, with Aiden Pearce and Wrench, on July 6, 2021. The roughly 560 GB of development tools and files were reportedly leaked by hackers.
Where to buy
Source: Eurogamer.
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