Hackers Leak Stolen EA Data Following Failed Ransom Attempt

Hackers who stole a cache of data from EA last month have begun to leak the information online after the publisher refused to meet ransom demands.

The hackers announced in June they had accessed some of EA’s servers and stolen over 780GB of data, including source code for FIFA 21 and the Frostbite engine SDK.

The goal of the hackers was to ransom the data back to EA for money, or offer the data to the highest bidder. But with EA not responding to the hackers, they have started posting some source code to an unnamed forum. According to Motherboard, this includes a 1.3GB compressed archive.

“Few week ago we send email for ransome [sic] to EA but we dont get any response so we will posting the [source],” one hacker wrote. “If they dont contact us or dont pay us we will keep posting it.”

However, EA told Motherboard that it has has been analyzing the files released and does not believe it poses a risk to players or their business.

“At this time, we continue to believe that it does not contain data that poses any concern to player privacy, and we have no reason to believe that there is any material risk to our games, our business or our players,” EA said. “We continue to work with federal law enforcement officials as part of this ongoing criminal investigation.”