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from the it's-only-a-game...of-cat-and-mouse dept.
Hackers Steal Wealth of Data from Game Giant EA:
"You have full capability of exploiting on all EA services," the hackers claimed in various posts on underground hacking forums viewed by Motherboard. A source with access to the forums, some of which are locked from public view, provided Motherboard with screenshots of the messages.
[...] In those forum posts the hackers said they have taken the source code for FIFA 21, as well as code for its matchmaking server. The hackers also said they have obtained source code and tools for the Frostbite engine, which powers a number of EA games including Battlefield. Other stolen information includes proprietary EA frameworks and software development kits (SDKs), bundles of code that can make game development more streamlined. In all, the hackers say they have 780gb[sic] of data, and are advertising it for sale in various underground hacking forum posts viewed by Motherboard.
[...] EA confirmed to Motherboard that it had suffered a data breach and that the information listed by the hackers was the data that was stolen.
It's not like they could use the source and SDK to release a new game. What's the point? To better understand how the games work and write cheats? Break the servers? How much is that really worth?
Also at SecurityWeek, BBC, and Ars Technica.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @05:46PM (7 children)
A former business partner was a senior developer and manager at Google and had a pretty sexy CV with decades of FAANG style experience. The type of guy good at getting companies with more money than sense to pay you $400/hour for consulting.
At some point during our product's development, he just started jacking some code from a number of sites and just plopping it in. I didn't say much at first since I assumed he was just throwing together a quick mock up of an idea. And then as we got closer to production the code was still in there. I talked to him about it and he said, "No worries. There was no license on it, so we're good to go." A rather heated debate then ensued...
For those that may not know, unlicensed code is not free code. Quite the opposite, when you publish something publicly even without a license it is automatically copyrighted. This is the reason that there are licenses like the Unlicense license. And using that (unlicensed) code in a commercial project is illegal and opens you right on up to lawsuits. I assumed this would be day 0 information at places like Google, but apparently I was wrong.
The point of this is that I suspect if you look at practically any major product, perhaps except those that expect to share source code like Microsoft, you're probably going to see illegal copy-pasta all over the place. EA is a company that I expect is an especially egregious violator here. If I was the owner of regularly accessed open source projects not under an MIT or other 'do whatever you want with this' type license, I'd be looking to grab a copy of this because if your code has been used, especially in one of their frameworks or SDKs, you just became a whole lot wealthier. You can probably grab one of the cheat-check tools they use in computer science programs to automate the entire process and sidestep any basic obfuscation efforts.
And I also expect this is one of the big fears of EA. Their code itself is probably pretty close to worthless, but unless they're keeping a tight rein on their developers, it could easily open them up to big dollar lawsuits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @06:32PM (6 children)
lol, srsly? not explicitly attaching a license just means auto-copyright?
this is monster silly, since this is happening in the "this-universe-exits-only-because-we-can-make-copies"-universe. so it's silly.
not attaching a license to watever means straight up there's no license ... but i guess this is to "easy" and "free" and would cost the law-and-lawyer business muchos dollarees! so away we go to the lobby to .. lobby for more idiotic and illogical laws!!!!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 11 2021, @07:22PM (1 child)
Don't represent yourself in court, kiddo...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @08:02AM
Nah I'd rather he represent himself in court. However he should live stream it too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Saturday June 12 2021, @04:57AM (3 children)
Not attaching a license means there's no license for you to do anything with the code.
That doesn't stop the code from being copyrighted: legally that happens as soon as it's written. And it you don't have a license for it, then you're leaving yourself open to legal challenges.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday June 12 2021, @07:09AM (1 child)
Yeah, this is about the same logic as seeing something on the shelf at a store without a price tag and taking it while saying "it must be free then!"
Lack of a copyright notice or license might stop them from getting hit with automatic treble damages in a lawsuit, but they'll still lose their case as soon as they admit they used the code because it didn't have a license.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 12 2021, @03:10PM
yes, but if you take from shelf there remains a hole!
ur shelf is not in the "this-univers-exists-because-copies-can-be-made"-universe.
if the tagless item would be digistructed by the shelf itself after removal nobody but you and a idiot lawyer would complain ... sry.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Saturday June 12 2021, @07:23AM
Copyright law doesn't restrict really small fragments, like single words or sentences. So it's possible to argue that most snippets people actually copy are too small to be copyrightable. It's pretty subjective though when a piece of code becomes large enough to qualify as "independent work of art". So you're not guaranteed to actually lose such a suit. Also you're unlikely to get sued in the first place because people who post small code fragments to demonstrate a programming technique wouldn't mind. And nobody else would have authority to sue.