Rockstar Games, the studio behind Grand Theft Auto, has been the target of a cyberattack for the second time in three years. A hacker group called ShinyHunters said it would release data stolen from the company if ransom demands were not met.

ShinyHunters initially gave Rockstar a 14 April deadline to enter negotiations, having gained access to company servers operated by a third party.

“Rockstar Games. Your … data was compromised … Pay or leak,” read a post from the group.

“This is a final warning to reach out by 14 Apr 2026 before we leak along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.”

The group has previously claimed to have targeted Microsoft, Cisco and Ticketmaster, among others.

Rockstar downplayed the impact of the hack in a statement, implying that no sensitive player data was involved. “We can confirm that a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach,” the company said. “This incident has no impact on our organisation or our players.”

The ShinyHunters group is linked to the Com, a loose affiliation of cybercriminals who are largely native English language speakers aged from 16 to 25. The demand for payment directed at Rockstar was published on the ShinyHunters leak site, a typical part of the online armoury deployed by groups where hackers threaten to publish stolen data if they do not receive payment, typically in bitcoin.

“They are very similar in terms of their demographic to lots of other groups under the Com umbrella,” said Aiden Sinnott, a principle threat researcher at the cybersecurity firm Sophos.

Last year ShinyHunters reportedly accessed the search history and viewing habits of premium users of Pornhub, one of the world’s most popular pornography websites.

The Grand Theft Auto series is one of the best-known and bestselling video game series, notorious for their satirical misanthropy as well as their wild popularity. The open-world crime video games are made in Edinburgh at Rockstar North, and are among the highest-grossing games in the world – making them one of Britain’s biggest cultural exports. Grand Theft Auto V and its multiplayer mode Grand Theft Auto Online have made more than $8bn since its release in 2013, according to company earnings reports.

This is not the first serious breach that Rockstar Games has suffered in recent years. In 2022, 90 minutes’ worth of in-development footage from Grand Theft Auto VI was posted on GTAForums, after a teenager from the Lapsus$ hacking collective breached Rockstar’s internal Slack channel.

The person responsible, Arion Kurtaj, was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in 2023. Rockstar claimed that $5m and thousands of hours of staff time were spent on recovery from the incident.

It has been estimated that costs for Grand Theft Auto VI, which has been in development for nearly 10 years, could be close to $2bn. Information about the forthcoming game is very tightly controlled, making any breach a serious issue for Rockstar and it’s parent company Take-Two Interactive. The game was originally slated for Autumn 2025, and was delayed until 19 November this year.