Hacker leaks internal Roblox documents online in extortion attempt

Video game company Roblox has been attacked by a hacker who appears to be blackmailing the firm.

A hacker targeting multi-billion dollar gaming company Roblox has posted internal company documents online in an attempt to extort the company, according to a statement from Roblox. These documents, totalling approximately 4GB of data, include internal documents, email addresses, personally identifiable information, and other sensitive materials.

Roblox is a sandbox-style game that allows players to create, share, play, and monetise games using built-in creator tools. Roblox is primarily targeted at younger children — approximately half of all US children play Roblox, according to a report given to Bloomberg.

The company behind Roblox has been hacked and apparently blackmailed. Picture: Roblox Corporation. Picture: Twitch

The company is currently valued at around $100 billion AUD, and hosts over 100 million active users, making Roblox a gaming juggernaut. The hacker targeted Roblox through “social engineering tactics/highly personalised scare tactics” according to a statement given to Motherboard — and this isn’t the first time Roblox has been targeted either.

In 2020, a hacker bribed a Roblox worker to gain access to Customer Support tools and used them to target and harass high-profile Roblox players alongside other Customer Support staff in an attempt to claim a “bug bounty” reward. Once the reward claim was denied, the hacker used the info to hack into and steal several items from other Roblox players.

While Roblox empowers children to create and share, it also adds an avenue for predators to target children. Roblox also has trouble dealing with the claims that the monetisation mechanisms encourage or mandate child labour — creating games and game assets is labour, and plenty of stories exist of young children being taken advantage of by older developers.

It may seem that these are just digital items but said items are worth quite a lot of money. Extremely rare items, called “limiteds”, are often worth several hundreds of dollars on the Roblox marketplace, making these hacking attempts potentially very lucrative.

In a statement given by Roblox, the company states, “These stolen documents were illegally obtained as part of an extortion scheme that we refused to co-operate with. We acted quickly upon learning of the incident, engaged independent experts to complement our information security team and have tuned our systems to seek to detect and prevent similar attempts.”

Original reporting by Vice Motherboard.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.