Little by little, as the days go by, the true origin of the great leak of The Last of Us: Part II that took place last week is closer to being discovered. Initially, according to the official statement of Naughty dog in this regard and by the type of material filtered, everything seemed to indicate that the leak had come from the studio itself through some disgruntled employee, although there was no official confirmation.
On May 1, however, Sony confirmed that it had identified the main perpetrators of the leak and assured that they are not related to Sony or Naughty Dog, thus discarding the rumor that said material had come from someone inside. The company declined to comment further.
A group of hackers and a vulnerability in game servers
Now, based on what we can read in Kotaku, everything points to the leak was the work of a group of hackers that last January they discovered a method to access Amazon servers that use Naughty Dog games. We are talking about titles like Uncharted 2 and 3, which use these servers for multiplayer, but apparently other information related to them had also been being stored and thanks to these data the group of hackers was able to obtain the necessary keys to access material under development.
They discovered that on the server of the Uncharted 3 there was material from the first The Last of Us, which led them to wonder if they wouldn't also find some material from The Last of Us: Part II. In March they managed to get at least 1 TB of data from the server-related part The Last of Us.
All this information related to filtering and hacking comes from some tweets published by the Pixelbutts account, whose manager, according to Kotaku, later spoke with the outlet privately to offer more details on how the exploit was discovered. On the other hand, Jason Schreier confirmed yesterday Having spoken to two people who know first-hand how the leak occurred, as well as to several employees of Naughty dog, and the bottom line is that indeed a group of hackers discovered a vulnerability in a patch for a game old Naughty Dog that allowed them to access the mentioned servers.
One of the leaked videos with spoilers for The Last of Us: Part II It included some information in its code that identified it with a version of the game as of April 1. For now, the identity of the person who decided to filter the material that the group of hackers had accessed and the reason that led him to do so, as well as whether they have managed to access some type of playable material, is unknown.
In any case, according to the person behind Pixelbutts, Naughty dog He modified the access code to his servers before or on April 30, and that previously, in February, he himself had made known to the study the security hole that in the end has resulted in this entire situation.
After several delays, The Last of Us: Part II will be released on June 19 for PS4.
