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Games

GTA 5 Source Code Reportedly Leaked Online a Year After Rockstar Hack (bleepingcomputer.com) 31

The source code for Grand Theft Auto 5 was reportedly leaked on Christmas Eve, a little over a year after the Lapsus$ threat actors hacked Rockstar games and stole corporate data. From a report: Links to download the source code were shared on numerous channels, including Discord, a dark web website, and a Telegram channel that the hackers previously used to leak stolen Rockstar data. In a post to a Grand Theft Auto leak channel on Telegram, the channel owner known as 'Phil' posted links to the stolen source code, sharing a screenshot of one of the folders.
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GTA 5 Source Code Reportedly Leaked Online a Year After Rockstar Hack

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  • Anyone got a download/torrent link?

  • by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Monday December 25, 2023 @09:17PM (#64105591) Homepage

    Unless you've got the time (and the expertise) to manually review every function in this codebase to verify that it actually does what it says it does and not something "special" that the leakers have rewritten it to do instead, you'd be well-advised to compile and run this software only inside a locked-down/throwaway VM or a dedicated/isolated test machine.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      People make that assumption with Linux daily.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Sounds like a good reason not to run Microsoft products.
    • Even if it not malicious, all it takes is a routine to ping a Rockstar server and that can be enough to start trade secret, or just "plain vanilla" IP infringement torts.

      Of course, it would be interesting to see how Rockstar handled a bunch of things, just from a computer science perspective, but using infringing code isn't exactly a professional way to do that.

    • Executable is useless without the data like the textures and audio.

    • Unless you've got the time (and the expertise) to manually review every function in this codebase

      Not really. It's pretty simple to find which parts of the code have network related functions. However, you only need to wait a week and if there is no, "GTA5 source leak is malware" stories then you're in the clear.

      • Thereâ(TM)s plenty of nasty tricks code running on your computer could do without requiring any networking; the most obvious would be to encrypt some important files on your machine and then display a message telling you where to send your bitcoin payment to receive the decryption key. (Or if they were feeling destructive rather than acquisitive, they could simply delete your files outright)

        • Again, "you only need to wait a week and if there is no, "GTA5 source leak is malware" stories then you're in the clear."

    • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @12:52PM (#64106773)
      Legally speaking, you're not allowed to use source leaks like this for anything, I believe. In fact, I think I recall that at least one game platform emulator project has explicit policies against not just using leaked code (obviously) but also against using leaked documentation or anything learned from said leaked documentation or code, to the point where if a contributor were to admit doing this, all their contributions would be purged. Game platform emulators are high profile legal targets as the platform creators often see them as threatening their profits, so they often have to err on the safe side of legal issues like this.

      Practically speaking, learning how the internals of the game works can be very helpful in game modification projects. As an example, there was a community-driven reverse engineering project for Ocarina of Time [zelda64.dev] that was able to successfully reverse engineer all of the source code (with substantial help from a version of the game that left debugging symbols in) such that the compiled code together with the assets is a bitwise match for the game ROM. This helped the creators of the existing randomization mod to add some nice new features and separately resulted in a very feature-rich PC port [shipofharkinian.com] that had its own (optional) built-in randomization mod along with many other optional changes, enhancements, bugfixes, etc.

      Now granted, the OoT decomp is a reverse engineering project and isn't legally tainted (as far as I know) so SoH and other mods are generally in the clear to use it freely. But small scale mods like the random ones you'd find on Nexus or Curseforge are probably going to fly sufficiently under the radar that just using information they've gleaned from a source leak would probably not endanger them, especially since it's often difficult to prove that kind of thing to begin with. So long as they're not directly using code from the leak and aren't monetizing their mods, they'll probably be fine and it could end up being quite helpful... though I'm not sure how active the GTA5 modding scene is as it's not a game I play.
  • Technically, that's what every copy sold is. It's in there somewhere, which is what makes it a program. And really, so what? One first-person sandbox matrix full of sprites are about the same as any other.
    • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Monday December 25, 2023 @09:35PM (#64105607)

      Source is different from compiled. Though you can use a decompiler to get something like source code, having access to exactly what humans wrote in the first place makes it much easier for another human to figure out what that code is doing and modify it.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's very good news for preservation. GTA V has some nasty DRM and could have been lost, if not for cracks and now having the source code.

        • > has some nasty DRM and could have been lost

          Anything that can be played offline EXCEPT for DRM should be legal to hack to correct this 'feature'.

          I do own GTA V, but when I was playing it I also had a cracked version that tended to prefer. For one thing, you can mod all you want without worry about getting banned from your gaming account.

        • by dknj ( 441802 )

          If I am the creator and I do not want the game/code to exist forever, then shouldn't it stand to reason that my right is preserved?

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I think you relinquish that right when you release the work to the public.

      • Source is different from compiled.

        Only for people who cannot read a disassembly.

        Frankly, it gets kinda scary when you're sitting in a conference with developers who think you're some sort of miracle worker because you decompiled their code and could reverse their shit. It's not rocket science, people... Computers can read and interpret that shit, so it has to be pretty trivial, ya know...

        • >Only for people who cannot read a disassembly.

          Source is an easier read, it is organized according to the thinking process of the dev. Given a moderately competent dev it will have meaningful variable names and structure, and on anything of significant size that starts to matter quickly.

          It's not rocket science, it's computer science, and you're a blowhard who is full of shit. I'm sure you've decompiled "Hello World" and had great success. Good for you.

          • I noticed that this is true for most people, it just isn't for me.

            Today, people are fully, 100% dependent, on compilers. Very few people write assembly code themselves anymore. And while people can try to obfuscate their code to make an analysis more complicated in their source, they cannot do that after the compiler had its run.

            Compilers produce very standardized output. There isn't a lot of things that you can do to make a compiler hide stuff from me. A stackframe is a stackframe, in every routine. Variab

  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @01:14PM (#64106819) Homepage Journal

    Seriously guys, if you have my company's source code. Please let me clean up a few things first. I'd be ashamed if you all found out how the sausage is made.

Almost anything derogatory you could say about today's software design would be accurate. -- K.E. Iverson

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