Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

These hackers are about to find out that the market value of 780GB of source code is wayyy less than they think.

Yeah, who would buy it? It would be radioactive for any competitor. Even if they were willing to pay for it and launder the funds used, releasing any games that used any EA secret sauce would very likely be detectable. They'd need engage in a parallel construction of source code history to show how they arrived at their implementation independently.

It's useful for devs of multiplayer game cheats.

Is there much money to be made in those? Honest question; I don't play games at all.

I would hazard definitely given how rampant online game cheating is across competitive shooters. People give grief to Blizzard, Steam, etc for their overzealous methods of detecting cheats and possibly increasing the vulnerabilities of your own machine but without some form of way to ban or detect cheats competitive online gaming would be a dead market. It's a cat vs mouse market and I know back when I was playing WoW every day there was a huge market for buying bots to harvest in-game resources and fishing.

Yes, and it's mind-boggling:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56579449

Wait i couldn't figure out exactly why they were arrested. Is it illegal to sell video games cheats in china? Was it at the request of the game devs involved? Or maybe money laundering? Even assuming that online cheating is illegal there for some baffling reason... why would the Chinese police care about cheaters on western video games when its not even illegal here? That bbc article is a bit frustrating, just not a lot of useful info there.

It would be interesting data to compare the "fence value" against the "book value". Often infosec decisionmaking is argued based on value-at-risk, and while everyone knows you don't actually lose much if any of the value if someone leaks the sources, it's still used in some sufficiently brazen exaggerations.

An interesting attack could be executed by an automaton that encrypted the payload such that the victim could trust that if they paid a ransom to some address before $my_fave_cryptocoin hit block #X then the key would never be revealed. If they didn't pay it, the key would be revealed to the attacker.

Pretty funny how important trust is in the existing ransom marketplace. But the current market is about restoring operations by recovering inaccessible data. EA didn't lose anything here but would likely prefer that no one else get access.

It’s pretty unlikely that a hacker would be able to run write/delete operations on a source control server with a regular employee’s credentials. And even if they did, there are probably enough copies floating around that they wouldn’t really need to pay a ransom for it.

You're correct about your claims, but I think you may have misread my post. I was suggesting that EA might pay a ransom to prevent disclosure, not a ransom to restore lost data. Even if the source control server was lost, EA would likely have backups.

“...some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Might be a bit overdramatic as these folks were not looking for any monetary gain, just to send EA a message.

I'm guessing its worth a lot more for their street cred than anything financially.

It costed them 10$ and 30m chatting. I'm sure they won't be devastated

Reply on news.ycombinator.com