Hacker Releases 1.7TB Treasure Trove of Gaming Info

mvar writes "According to Kotaku, a hacker named SuperDaeE who breached multiple gaming companies (Valve, Sony, MS to name a few) has released a 1.7TB treasure trove file for download. The file which contains source code for older titles plus development kits for the PS4 and Xbox One consoles, is encrypted and SuperDaeE claims that it is his insurance in case he gets arrested."

Comments

Insurance Policy?

[Orestesx]

Right...cause if he gets in trouble, blackmail will surely get him out of it.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Listen up, world! I've got evidence that the senator's been holding a human trafficking and slavery ring in the #7 warehouse on the docks, as well as papers showing the exact schedules of these activities and how they've helped his campaigns! And here's all of that evidence for download! I'm using this as insurance against him arresting me for my breaking and entering into his office to get this information!"
"So... how is this insurance?"
"Because if he tries to arrest me, I'll release all the information to the world!"
"But you just did that."
"Of course I did! That way he knows I'm not bluffing! If he tries something stupid, I'll release it all again! So you see, Senator, I hold all the cards!"

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for reference, if you look at the summary you'll see that what he's released is that trove... encrypted. The idea is that if he gets arrested, he yells out the passphrase, but until then this might as well be 1.7TiB of /dev/random

Re:Insurance Policy?

[spiffmastercow]

Just for reference, if you look at the summary you'll see that what he's released is that trove... encrypted. The idea is that if he gets arrested, he yells out the passphrase, but until then this might as well be 1.7TiB of /dev/random

My guess is it's 1.7GB of /dev/random anyway.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[firex726]

So neither we nor the companies may even know the extent of what he has.
Kinda shitty plan on his part it seems.

And even then, why release it to begin with?
Had he kept quiet he might never have been caught, by putting it out there he all but guaranteed his arrest.

Also what good is the Dev SW for a PS4 or XBone without the hardware? We already know what the HW will be like, does anyone give a shit what SW the consoles will use? The people who could make use of it, developers; already have their Dev kits in hand.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[lbmouse]

It might help determine how rapey his cellmate will be.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeated 1024 times to account for the 1.7TiB of data?

Re:Insurance Policy?

[tattood]

Sure, the game companies may not want this released, but does the FBI care? If they investigate, and find and arrest the hacker, it's up to the D.A. whether or not to prosecute, not the game companies. This seems like a worthless insurance policy/blackmail, because the people going after him are unaffected by the action of him releasing the encryption key.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[firex726]

Sure, but Dev kits are also much more open than a release console. They need to be to let the Dev run unsigned code of their own while it's being made; any exploits you may find in this code may not be usable in the final product; especially since the consoles are possibly still being made.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[nedlohs]

Because yelling a passphrase is easier than yelling out 1.7TB of data on the spot?

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Minwee]

Because yelling a passphrase is easier than yelling out 1.7TB of data on the spot?

They're trashing our rights, man! They're trashing the flow of data! Hack the planet!

Re:Insurance Policy?

[FatdogHaiku]

Almost.
Does the FBI work through U. S. Attorneys?
Yes. Although the FBI is responsible for investigating possible violations of federal law, the FBI does not give an opinion or decide if an individual will be prosecuted. The federal prosecutors employed by the Department of Justice or the U.S. Attorneys offices are responsible for making this decision and for conducting the prosecution of the case.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/faqs

Local stuff is handled by a D.A. (District Attorney) or City. County, or State Prosecutor.

I agree his "insurance policy is useless... It's akin to soaking himself in a flammable liquid and threatening to light it. All he can do by releasing the decryption key is provide more evidence against himself.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

He has a Beowulf cluster of geiger counters!

Re:Insurance Policy?

[MMC Monster]

Or his personal porn collection.

Why back it up if you can get the world to do it?

Re:Insurance Policy?

[DrXym]

Safe how? It sounds like he is being charged for possession of kiddy porn among other things. He'll be tried and convicted regardless of his "threat" (which in itself is a offence) and if he's fucking stupid enough to release the key he can expect to receive fresh charges on top since he has just incriminated himself. So he'll probably go from 3-5 years up to 10+ years. Doubtless all sentencing to be served consecutively. Great plan that.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[SuricouRaven]

Depends if his spitefulness outweighs his long-term planning - if he gets a long enough sentence to effectively ruin his life, revenge is going to look very appealing indeed. He also said that his 'inability to access a computer' would release the passphrase, suggesting he is paranoid enough to have a dead-man's-handle - either tucked away on a server no-one knows about, or a few friends with orders to release it if he goes out of contact.

The charges are so diverse they look suspiciously like the result of a trawling - someone in law enforcement decided he has to go down and did a through rummage through his home and computers to hunt of any useful dirt they could charge him for. That means his blackmail ploy isn't going to work: While it could convince game companies to back down from the path of mutual destruction, a prosecutor would have little to lose from the leak and a lot to lose politically if seen to be giving in to the demands of criminals. Espicially now the kiddie porn card has been played - even if, as is more likely than not, it's nothing but a naked selfie his girlfriend sent him. He is seventeen.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 1.7 GB of /dev/random. All he needs to do is release the correct one-time pad!

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Zencyde]

I'm under the impression that he has something automatically set up to yell the passphrase for him if he isn't there to stop it once every arbitrary schedule of time. I imagine that this is some sort of timer system, possibly set on a weekly basis. Easier to guarantee it working as this situation, in which he is behind bars, would be expected. If he's as smart as he comes off, he even has this trigger set across multiple locations through sources that he's accessed only anonymously. He could even have a botnet set to pull this trigger for him, as botnets seem to be super popular in some circles.

Did he do this? I don't know. But he likely knows enough about the world to know that he'd have to to have any hope of his plan working. I don't imagine he expects to save himself with this.

It reminds me of this movie/show I saw a long time ago, in which a trigger was tied to this person's heartbeat. Should his heart stop, something catastrophic was to happen. Sort of a guarantee that people would want him alive. It's always tied to something beyond the control of everyone else. Him yelling a passphrase? Easily within the control of the prison system. Computers yelling out a passphrase for him? Not worth the resources to try to stop.

Yes, this is all conjecture. But it would work a little better than what you suggested, and I'm sure this guy knows that.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[interval1066]

whatever. I think the dude is funny as hell. I hope they don't murder him.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[hairyfeet]

What? Who in the fuck is soooo damned retarded they will download 1.7 fricking TB of data that is completely fucking useless because its encrypted? Hell how in the fuck do you know this isn't just his way of railing against the possession laws by seeing how many dumb fucks he can get to download child pron huh?

You have NO idea, ZERO, what the fuck is in this stuff, you only have the word of one single person who is already an admitted criminal who has broken into countless companies, caused who knows how many people to have to deal with the "fun"of having to replace their credit cards, and we are just supposed to take his word for it? There is stupid and then there is plain old ignorant, and if you download 1.7Tb without even knowing WTF it is you are firmly in the latter column.

Re: Insurance Policy?

[madprof]

The 5th what? US constitutional amendment? Do they even have such an equivalent law in Australia?

Re:Insurance Policy?

[tftp]

Unfortunately, "your wrong" © on all accounts. You may be not convicted if after several years of arrest and bond and trial you will prove that it's not your {CP,cocaine,whatever}. Even that is not obvious because your opposition is not empty-handed either.

There were many instances of innocent people, one even being mayor of the town where it happened, receiving an unexpected package - and when they touched it they were arrested by cops who were lying in wait. Sometimes drug dealers ship drugs not to their own address, but to someone nearby, who receives packages at the door. If you get caught with illegal items, like a bag of drugs in your car, under the carpet, you will be presumed to be the owner of the contraband. If you think that the bag was dropped by a hitchhiker who you gave a lift a year ago, good luck proving that - you will never prove that it wasn't you.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Digital Vomit]

You never, ever go to the cops if you come across CP. Ever. Most police forces have proven themselves completely untrustworthy when it comes to CP. If you come across CP, you destroy it and keep your mouth shut.

Re:Insurance Policy?

[Heretic2]

Just for reference, if you look at the summary you'll see that what he's released is that trove... encrypted. The idea is that if he gets arrested, he yells out the passphrase, but until then this might as well be 1.7TiB of /dev/random

If you read the article, you'll see that it gets auto-decrypted if he fails to check in. So if he gets arrested and can't access the failsafe to reset it the timer, it gets released.

Unintended Consequences

[Anonymous Coward]

Now hackers everywhere have a reason to get SuperDaeE arrested.

FTP?

[Anonymous Coward]

> using centralized resource to distribute "insurance"
>> 2013

OMG

[lesincompetent]

Valve too?
Please SuperDaeE tell me: can they count to three?

Too large to be useful...

[Darkness404]

This sounds like too large of an "insurance" to be useful. Most people don't have the bandwidth or the space to hold 1.7 TB of encrypted info. Smaller files might make sense but not huge ones like this.

Re:Too large to be useful...

[VorpalRodent]

And even if they did...what's the value? Please explain to me if I'm missing something, but if I can't decrypt it, then my having a copy is just to protect his "insurance policy", in which case I'm aiding and abetting. I assume additional risk with zero potential benefit, except perhaps helping "stick it to the corporate blah blah blah"?

Re:Too large to be useful...

[dittbub]

Perhaps he will take a wikileaks like approach. Release individual games slowly over time but have the larger file available should he be interupted

Re:Too large to be useful...

[rodrigoandrade]

I bet he's too young to have ever used alt.binaries to know how it's done.

Re:Too large to be useful...

[HybridST]

If I were to start the download on my home connection which tops out at about 100kb/s(fastest in my area) it won't be finished before I receive the 4 year degree I start in the fall. Then there's the keyfile to think about. I think I'll skip this one.

Re:Too large to be useful...

[Grave]

Or he actually did mean 100kb/s, which puts it at 4.3 years, fitting the timeline he stated.

I am a 1337 hax0r

[Spy Handler]

I have 2.0 GB of source code for Windows 8, Windows 9 alpha, Call of Duty Ghosts, World of Warcraft Annihilation and Donkey Kong Junior. I have encrypted the file and am withholding the key in case I get arrested. But trust me, it's all there.

Re:I am a 1337 hax0r

[interkin3tic]

It does say he "leaked loads of accurate new info to Kotaku about the then unnamed Xbox One and PS4 earlier this year," which is possibly why the generally-not-born-yesterday kotaku may be taking it somewhat seriously.

Re:I am a 1337 hax0r

[jellomizer]

You needed Donkey Kong Junior just to make you hit 2.0 Gigabytes exactly. Right?

Re:I am a 1337 hax0r

[X0563511]

Did you bother even searching for it?

Re:I am a 1337 hax0r

[Anubis IV]

which is possibly why the generally-not-born-yesterday kotaku may be taking it somewhat seriously.

My faith in Kotaku has diminished quite a bit following the attack piece they published against Silicon Knights and Dennis Dyack. Dyack (who is certainly no saint, but is also not the embezzler he's made out to be) later did a point-by-point rebuttal to it, providing convincing information and evidence to contradict each of its claims, and even managed to get a hold of a copy of an e-mail from a Wired editor to the freelance author of the Kotaku attack piece, in which the editor turned down the article due to its unsubstantiated claims that had no basis in fact. It turns out that the article was shopped around to a number of other magazines, all of which turned it down, before it finally got sold to Kotaku, who apparently saw no issues with publishing an attack piece that didn't have a scrap of evidence and was based solely on claims made by disgruntled anonymous sources that couldn't even have had access to the information they claimed to have.

Re:I am a 1337 hax0r

[oztiks]

I have 2.0 GB of source code for Windows 8, Windows 9 alpha

Please, if you're going to steal something you should check to make sure it's of real value to someone first. Donkey Kong Junior is perhaps the biggest ticket item you've mentioned!

1.7tb of stuff..

[gl4ss]

..that nobody knows what it is?
that's a lot of hd to keep as insurance for some random dude.

and ftp? wtf? ever heard of bittorrent. or tor.

Re:1.7tb of stuff..

[nitehawk214]

Why would a torrent swarm of people download a giant file that they cannot decrypt?

You know what, don't answer that. I am sure enough file hoarders will grab the file to keep the torrent alive alive.

Insurance?

[Darth Snowshoe]

Insurance from whom, against whom? Like, Valve is going to call in its favor and get the FBI to get off his case, for fear of their DRM being compromised? I can totes see that happening.

Encrypted blob

[SirGarlon]

I totally believe it's possible to exfiltrate data from multiple game companies (or indeed any companies). But how do we know he didn't just upload a 1.7 TB encrypted blob of random garbage? The word of a 17-year-old script kiddie is not exactly a lot to go on.

Re:Encrypted blob

[CastrTroy]

And it seems odd that there would be so much data. Source code doesn't take that much space, and neither do development kits. Perhaps he's including game assets like textures and cut scenes from the games, but I don't really see much point in including that, since it would mostly be easy to extract from the actual game files themselves.

Re:Encrypted blob

[loufoque]

The xbox 360 base SDK is 2GB. If you count all extra stuff for Kinect etc. it's even bigger.
And they probably have tons of other middleware software, some of which could come with their own editing and authoring tools. That alone could account for a hundred gigs if not more.
Then there is source code. It's not unusal for a piece of software to have sources that account for 500MB, and several gigabytes if you include binaries.

All in all they probably also have binary assets of some sort, but software does take quite some space on a disk.

Re:Encrypted blob

[sl4shd0rk]

And it seems odd that there would be so much data. Source code doesn't take that much space

Um, it's really not that uncommon for source code to occupy much more space than it's compiled form. Perhaps you need to stop writing so much stuff in debug..

Re:Fucking idiot

[interkin3tic]

THAT'S what you're upset about?

Okay, call him an "Information Liberator." He doesn't appear to have referred to himself as a hacker, at least not in the short article, so lets assume he never did. Do you still hope he dies imprisoned?

If not, why are you getting so bent out of shape about a trivial use of a trivial word?

lol wat

[Anonymous Coward]

Insurance in what sense?

1. Get arrested;
2. Release password to unencrypt source code for old software;
3. Get charged with yet another crime;
4. ???

Hang on a sec

[DrXym]

Since this is encrypted this could be 1.7TB of shit for anyone knows. Or is there a sampler or something people are supposed to download to know it isn't?

Re:Do it like Snowden

[PRMan]

"China: Bastion of civil rights." Has kind of a funny ring to it...

Re:Fucking idiot

[ae1294]

I never user products from companies who feed customer data to the NSA. Are you listening, Google?

So how are you posting this again? Every Internet company is feeding data to the NSA sooooo?

He's obviously not Canadian

[Kinwolf]

At least we know this hacker isn't Canadian. With our current ISP plans, it would have taken 1.5 years to upload 1.7TB of data without busting the bank in extra fees for bandwith.

Honest and for true?

[Hartree]

I've released a file which contains the complete plans for the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator which can blow up the earth.

The file is encrypted, and if the local parking meter attendants put anymore tickets on my suburban, I'll release the passphrase.

I really, really will!

That is all.

Re:Honest and for true?

[sconeu]

I cracked your encryption, and built it. Then I tried it out.

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Where was the KABOOM? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!!!

Re:Lovely logic there...

[liamevo]

I was merely pointing out that there is some credibility that what he says is in the archive, actually is in the archive, and that acting as if it's just some script kiddie making stuff up has to ignore the fact that this kid has proven credible with the info already leaked.

Re:I smell...

[loufoque]

You can't just decrypt stuff just because you want to. It's protected by the power of math.

Re:So not only a hacker...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a minor himself. The "child pornography" could be pictures of his own dick for all we know, or a 17 year old girlfriend. The "drug" charges are "posession of cannabis and cannabis paraphernalia" so who gives a shit and the "weapons" charge was supposedly a stun gun. Not a taser, just one of those sparky things.

Password

[Eleint]

Has someone downloaded this and tried the password "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, select, start"?

Upgrade my cell to solitary, please....

[TiggertheMad]

More to the point, unless the 1.7TB contains something of interest in the first place (ex: stolen source code that isn't encrypted), who is going to bother to download it? See, you have to give people an incentive to download that much shit before they are going to act as your own personal distributed storage service.

Bet when he gets arrested (not if), that there aren't any copies of his 'get out of jail card' in the wild.

Also, just for the record, have there ever been instances of anyone successfully blackmailing the cops into letting them go? Ever?

Re:Upgrade my cell to solitary, please....

[kkwst2]

Actually I disagree. All you have to do is convince people there is a good chance it contains something of interest. That it is encrypted might entice people to download it in the hopes of discovering the key or decrypting it. I'll take your bet. I'll bet you a 2 TB hard drive.

I'm also willing to bet someone has blackmailed authorities into letting them go. I'm also willing to bet that said authorities did not announce that they were letting the accused go because he had some really juicy dirt on them.

A perverse incentive

[KingSkippus]

So are we, the public, supposed to now cheer him and and support him not getting arrested? Oh, hell no, I want all of those goodies released. I hope they arrest his ass, and the sooner, the better.