This incident was similar to all other security breaches, as the reports are saying Activision’s sensitive data related to its employees and upcoming games got exposed to hackers. Let’s discuss further details below.
Activision Data Breach: All Details
This data breach is said to be done by the hacker on December 4, 2022, as noted by security research group vx-underground, which was the first to report this incident via tweet.
Activision did not tell anyone. pic.twitter.com/urD64iIlC5 — vx-underground (@vxunderground) February 20, 2023 This tweet also includes some images that prove that the threat actor was successfully able to enter the company’s Slack channel and also posted something in a general chat. While the vx-underground revealed how the hacker was able to gain access, they said, “our information security team swiftly addressed an SMS phishing attempt and quickly resolved it.” Besides, they also noted that in their investigation, they found no clue that the hacker was able to access sensitive employee data, game code, or player data. But a report from Insider Gaming got released where they claimed that they had analyzed the entire leak, and they found it included employees’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, salaries, work locations, and other details. And this is because the hacker hacked the account of the employee who is in the Human Resources department. As we all know, gaming giant Activision is popular for its Call of Duty game franchise, and in this data breach, some of its future sequel’s data also got compromised, as Insider Gaming’s report claimed. They found some content related to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s upcoming DLC, Call of Duty 2023 (Codenamed Jupiter), and Call of Duty 2024 (Codenamed Cerberus). Besides, vx-underground’s tweet also claimed that the company didn’t reveal anything about this data breach publically. Note: TechViral Media and its author had no access to the leaked data. All the above information is discovered in Insider Gaming’s report.
