GTA publisher Take-Two’s dreadful week is made worse by another disastrous hack

Take-Two is definitely not having a good time. Following the colossal leak of the weekend from GTA VIit is Septimana horribilis continues with the fresh news that 2K Games support services have been hackedand customers are now being sent phishing scams.

In a post on the official 2K Support Twitter account, 2K stated that its helpdesk platform had been hacked and the intruder got away with a slew of customer emails. It says it has “become known that an unauthorized third party has illegally accessed one of our vendors’ credentials on the helpdesk platform that 2K uses to provide support to our customers.”

The tweeted statement continues, “The unauthorized party sent a communication to certain players containing a malicious link. Please do not open emails or click on links received from the 2K Games support account.” (Your emphasis.)

This is quite a disastrous affair for 2K. When a network breach is detected, companies can usually find that even if email addresses may have been compromised, they can assure that passwords are salted and hashed, that credit card information was not compromised, and so on. But here the attacker was clearly able to actually use 2K’s systems to contact customers via the official account, thus bypassing any usual spam filters or sane bullshit detectors that a person might have installed.

2K has taken its “support portal” offline while they try to figure out what the heck happened, which isn’t a great sight to see, especially in the week of NBA 2K23‘s publication. The statement said, “We’ll issue a notification when you’re back to interacting with official 2K helpdesk emails,” which is…not a foolproof method. First, it gives the impression that a previously unread phishing email might eventually be safely clicked, and second, it hardly ever reaches the recipients of the email who aren’t lucky enough to have noticed the tweet (or read the coverage in the press).

Meanwhile, those with open tickets are told at the time of writing that 2K “doesn’t have any estimates as to when you’ll receive a response,” with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they “keep up to date via email.”

Continue reading: NBA 2K23: The Kotaku Review

For those who think they’ve already fallen for the phishing scam, 2K recommends resetting all passwords, enabling multi-factor authentication (but avoiding SMS-based verification!), clogging their PCs with antivirus software and “Check your account settings to see if forwarding rules have been added or changed to your personal email accounts.”

There’s another reason to worry if you notice this A customer realized that a hack had probably taken place about ten hours before the statement was released, but was ripped off according to official account. That original customer replied Nearly nine hours before the hack was confirmed, he said, “At this point, it’s very clear you’ve been hacked for support stuff. Make a statement before the damage is too big.”

Many responses to the statement have come from robbed customers who claim to have lost their accounts or seen money removed from their games. Many more come from people who clicked the links in the emails but now don’t know if they harmed their devices or their account and didn’t get any clear answers.

It appears that many of the phishing emails are signed “Shikhar A” and contain a link to a ZIP file claiming to be a new version of the 2K Launcher. It’s a safe bet to say you don’t want to download this should you receive such an email.

We reached out to 2K for more details about the attack and why it took so long to send out the alert, but despite the potential usefulness of the responses to their customers, we were quickly told, “We’re not commenting.” 2K’s social media posts further related to the matter.”