GTA VI leaks: What we know about Cyberleek and the effort to uncover who’s behind it

Welcome back to Houston Live and Local. You may have seen it all over your timeline. Grand Theft Auto 6, one of the world's most anticipated games, and fans got a special treat yesterday. 27 minutes of new footage ahead of its November launch. Yesterday on Netflix, and then it went on YouTube, just to give you an indication of how big the franchise is. GTA 5 sold more than 230 million copies and made more than $800 million in the first 24 hours. The franchise has long been controversial for its graphic violence, adult content, but there's no denying its enormous reach. But now, unreleased GTA 6 gameplay is being posted online by someone using the name CyberLeak. Rockstar's parent company, Take Two, is seeking information from Microsoft and Discord to try to identify who is behind the leaks. Joining me now is tech expert, Juan Guevara-Torres. Thank you so much for being here. It's such a big talker. I want to start with CyberLeak. So what do we know about the latest leak and how this person or groups could have gotten access to such a big franchise? You know, there is something that probably people don't know, but essentially the company behind this game had a big fallout with employees at the beginning of the year. So my understanding from what I know in terms of sources for this company is that it's possible. It's possible that somebody, I mean, clearly somebody had access to the game, was part of developers, either a contractor or something had access to the game, might be part of the developing team. And then essentially, it's somebody who was or is in touch with the people developing this game. And what we know so far is there might be a disgruntled people, a group of people that might have been responsible for this. Now, CyberLeak is obviously an alias, is somebody who is pretending to be a hacker and had access to a lot of footage. And like all hackers do, they release it piece by piece. They never dump everything in one go. And my understanding is this has been in automatic cycles, okay? So it's gonna be a leak after a leak after a leak. And clearly Rockstar is, the headquarters in New York are crazy to find out what's going on and if they can find the identity of this person or group of people based on what they post on social media. And CyberLeak has said himself that even if you find me, these automatic leaks will continue, that he personally has to stop the leak every day because they are an automatic rotation. How do you find someone that is remaining anonymous like that? Well, first of all, law enforcement has a lot of tools to be able to find the identity of these group of individuals. Now, they take a lot of precautions that which we're not gonna discuss on the air on how they do that and how they protect their identities. However, law enforcement has logs and a lot of information, metadata, especially from the way this has been leaked. In other words, they will be able to find out who is, at least they believe they can find out based on the leaks that they have posted so far on social media. There are ways to be able to track these people down. Now, from what I've seen, I believe he's expected, he's expecting to get caught. Okay? Okay. And because of that, that's why you have an automatic cycle. You have what is called a daemon. It's a software designed to be releasing pieces of information in intervals, okay? And only with a distress code, that's what it's called, you can stop this from happening. Now, the question here is what does he stand to gain? And most hackers do it because they feel this is the right thing to do. He's not looking for a monetary gain, okay? With this group of people, from what I've seen and other security experts, we've talked about this, he doesn't stand anything to gain. He, in fact, is facing federal prison for doing this. And clearly, Rockstar is not gonna let that go. So there is something going on there that we probably will find out in the coming days or weeks where we probably will find out that he's a disgruntled employee, close to disgruntled employee. And what we've seen is that, although this is leaked in August, on November the 19th, when all the fans are waiting, have been waiting for 13 years for a new version of this game, this is not gonna impact sales at all. Oh, absolutely not. But this isn't Rockstar's first breach. Back in 2017, 2022. Kind of the same thing. A 17-year-old had unreleased clips. And I think from a hotel using a fire stick. That's correct. I mean, how does that even happen? A cell phone? So it doesn't take a sophisticated equipment. It doesn't take sophisticated equipment. What it takes is access to the materials. And the only way you can access the materials is if you're in. I know for a fact, people that are fans, they've been trying to fly drones close to the headquarters to find out what's going on the computers because they really wanna know what's going on behind the game. So clearly, and I'm sure law enforcement knows this, clearly this is somebody who had access to all this footage. Wow, okay. So what can the average person take away from this? I know it's a major company and major business, but for your own personal details. Okay. Well, first of all, when somebody wants to hack a company, usually they will look at somebody inside the company. Either you hack somebody from the inside, you do social engineering from somebody on the inside, or you're related to somebody who has access within the inside. It's very difficult to hack somebody just cold with all the protections that this company have. So the interest is there. Obviously the fans are there. And if you let go a majority of the development team prior launch like this, somebody is going to be mad. And it's going to try to damage what's going on. Especially the development team for a game that is the biggest in history of any entertainment release. Yes, it is. It's going to change completely. Come November, or as soon as they catch CyberLeak, I want to talk to you again. Sure. This is a really big deal moving forward. It's going to affect the economy. It really is. People will be sitting in their homes watching more. There'll be more ordering. There's a lot that's going to happen with how massive this is. I'll tell you something real quick. It hasn't been the first time where the company actually decides to leak something like this, not this company in general, and pretend it's a cyber attack. So we'll see what they find, but eventually this is going to increase the interest on this game. And I don't think it's going to affect sales. In fact, I think it's going to make them higher. If that's even a thing. Thank you so much. Because they're already going to be big.