The leak of The Last of Us Part II threatens to haunt Naughty Dog and Sony for a long time. If the interested parties have not revealed how such a thing was possible, several sources believe to know.
see also: The Last of Us Part II victim of a massive online leak, avoid the spoilers
Sony said this Friday: those responsible for spreading game sequences and cinematics from The Last of Us Part II have been identified and have no connection to development teams. Official information stops there.
However, Kotaku was followed by an avalanche of tweets from a certain Pixelbutts, QA Californian tester having provided an explanation on the method, the confirmation by a person having knowledge of the way in which development works at Naughty Dog that it was a hack in good and due form. Information that Jason Schreier corroborated.
OK: After talking to two people with direct knowledge of how TLOU2 leaked as well as some Naughty Dog employees, I have a good idea of what happened. Short version: hackers found a security vulnerability in a patch for an older ND game and used it to get access to ND's servers.
– Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) May 3, 2020
OK, after talking to two people with first-hand knowledge of how TLOU2 fled as well as employees of Naughty Dog, I have a good idea about what happened. Short version: hackers found a security flaw in a patch from an old ND game and exploited it to access the servers.
The explanation, a bit technical, is that the information of an encrypted key allowing access to the Amazon servers of the studio is in the code of titles like Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us, which connect to it in multiplayer. In January, hackers discovered the process, which allowed them to recover content as they went along. In March, it would be 1 TB of data that had been misappropriated.
Naughty Dog would have been warned of the problem in February but would not have changed the code giving access to the servers before the end of April. For Pixelbutts, it is not the group of hackers who found the flaw, made up of "Naughty Dog fans happy to get their hands on development-related content", who would be responsible for the leak, but someone outside who would have heard of the process.
It therefore seems obvious that the leak had nothing to do with an employee who was unhappy with the working conditions at Naughty Dog – which have improved a lot according to Jason Schreier – as rumored in the first place claimed.
The Last of Us Part II is coming to PS4 on June 19.
