Roblox WARNING after hackers steal ‘sensitive documents’ by extorting employee

0
37
BRAZIL - 2021/10/06: In this photo illustration the Roblox logo seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

ONLINE GAMING PLATFORM Roblox has issued a warning to its millions of global users following a cyber attack, which saw hackers stealing data including members’ personal details.

According to Motherboard, cybercriminals made off with a cache of internal documents amounting to a whopping 4GB of data.

Roblox is one of the world’s most popular games

The data was stolen from an employee of the firm before the crooks posted it online.

It included names, email addresses and ID documentation of multiple individuals, and was part of an extortion plan against Roblox, the company said in a statement.

“Roblox has been actively investigating a phishing incident, which involved a Roblox employee being targeted by cybercriminals (through social engineering tactics/using highly personalised scare tactics),” the company said.

“These stolen documents were illegally obtained as part of an extortion scheme that we refused to cooperate 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.”

Roblox lets creators make their own games and virtual worlds via a platform and makes money by implementing microtransactions.

As it stands, the platform boasts around 43.2 million daily active users worldwide. An increase from 19 million from the end of 2019.

To put that into better real-world terms, it’s used by at least half of children in the US in some shape or form.

It should come as no surprise, then that the gaming juggernaut is valued at a colossal $68 billion.

If you’re a Roblox user, it might be worth changing your password on the platform as a precautionary measure. 

The news of the hack arrives only months after the platform experienced a mysterious outage that left players fuming for several hours, with some even threatening to leave Roblox for Minecraft instead.

The reason for the outage was never revealed.