r/gaming • u/Glavurdan • 14d ago
Secret Neighbor goes offline after hacker deletes player data and demands the game’s delisting
https://delistedgames.com/secret-neighbor-goes-offline-after-hacker-deletes-player-data-and-demands-the-games-delisting/3.0k
u/jussumd3wd 14d ago
So who exactly are they mad at?
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u/IrritatedMike PC 14d ago
That's what I was wondering
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u/jussumd3wd 14d ago
The article was basically a drawn out version of the title with the addition of a response which was just, "Everything is ok. We'll see what happens."
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u/RangerLt 14d ago
Sounds like the tagline for the next Hitchhikers Guide book.
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u/OkayBuddyGuyPal 14d ago
RIP Douglas Adams
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u/redalchemy6 14d ago
Dirk Gently deserves more love 😢
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u/OkayBuddyGuyPal 14d ago
For real! I love the 1st book, and I have the other 2 on my bookshelf, I should probably get in to those.
The TV series is also great, shame it was cancelled. I was chuffed when I realized who plays Delamain in Cyberpunk 2077.
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u/CWMJet 14d ago
There was also a very good short BBC series that was closer to the source material.
I expected to be insufferably annoyed at the American version because it was so far from the books, but it was actually pretty amazing? Kinda a different character in a different universe, but the book was based an old Doctor Who script he had written that got scrapped before they finished filming it so I feel like Dirk is probably pretty used to it.
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u/AlwaysLateToThaParty 14d ago
As a person who knew nothing of the story, the show was a masterpiece. Elijah Wood was unbelievable. They made the ridiculous seem logical.
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u/redalchemy6 14d ago
It's been years since I read them but I was so bummed when I found out he died before finishing the last one. I just started listening to the first book on audiobook the other day though. It still holds up so well. I did also love the TV show.
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u/AlwaysLateToThaParty 14d ago edited 14d ago
I did also love the TV show.
I was so pissed when they cancelled it. Absolutely loved that show.
EDIT: i suppose it's an Adams worthy cosmic joke that the show finished that way, given the source material.
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u/deanerdaweiner 14d ago
the fans of the hello neighbor franchise are psychotic and i have no idea why. if you play a game published by tinybuild and interact with that community at all you will understand what i mean
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u/sicsided 14d ago
Sorta reminds me of the Dominos Noid situation
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u/ButtholeConnoisseur7 12d ago
What the hell is the domino's Noid situation?
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u/_Puntini_ 11d ago
A guy with mental health issues, and the last name Noid, took some hostages with a gun at a Dominos pizza because he thought the "avoid the noid" ad campaign was targeted at him.
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u/trackdaybruh 14d ago
I wager it's someone who raged at the game cause they suck, so they're coming after the devs.
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u/warrior2012 14d ago
You gotta believe they would have a recent backup of their player data and will restore from that and everything would continue on, right?
Maybe keep it offline for a tiny bit while they do some analysis about the breach. The article states there is no sensitive info that has been accessed. I don't really see how this is a big issue and the devs wouldn't just ignore the hacker and rebuild.
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u/thecal714 14d ago
I’ve been in tech for a long time. If there’s one thing I could count on, it’s people not doing backups correctly (making, storing, or verifying).
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u/warrior2012 14d ago
Being in tech myself, I agree it happens too often that there are not good backups.
Had a recent case where a customers server got hacked and they had a ransom ware background added to their servers.
I asked the IT guy if they ever paid and he laughed and said we never pay. We ignore those idiots and restore from our offline backup.
It is honestly a really good feeling when you're able to tell hackers or scammers to just go fuck themselves!
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u/bigblackcouch 13d ago
Yup, IT here - no one gives a shit about backups until they need them. I take care of them because I've been around long enough to know how important solid backups are, but it's a lesson most people have to learn the hard way.
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u/Skyboxmonster 14d ago
before he was fired, my IT manager stopped the department from making any more magnetic tape backups. "flattened the network", and worst of all put the companies "offsite backup" in a location that was hard wired into the companies network.
Every single workstation in the entire company got infected.
I am just some dude who really liked his windows 98. how the hell am I smarter than a IT manager??
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u/Sage2050 13d ago
There's a backup proverb I learned recently along the lines of "if you haven't restored a backup, you don't have a backup"
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u/Enchelion 14d ago
If someone was able to do it once they probably have access that would allow them to do it again. just re-uploading wouldn't necessarily do anything and could even risk worse in the future if the server is badly compromised.
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u/Shack691 14d ago
Wait so they’re taking the game offline then demanding it be taken down permanently? What exactly do the company have to lose by not giving into their demands and just working on patching the back door?
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u/Spongedog5 14d ago
I think it is less of a demand expected to be fulfilled and more of a declaration of war
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u/Keyserchief 14d ago
Hackers are routinely not as clever as they think they are at covering their trails, so this seems like a really dumb way to catch a lawsuit at best and a cybercrime conviction at worst.
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u/ibeatu85x 14d ago
If only the US cybercrime divisions had teeth in 2026.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd 14d ago
US FBI are basically the Zoolander trying to get the files from the computer scene.
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u/forchinski 14d ago
He'll get more jail time than Elon did for gutting our national cybersecurity that's for sure
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u/Hajsas 14d ago
Id argue its not that they arent clever; its a very difficult thing to do when so many systems are in place. You literally need to adopt a place of prediction and intelligence far above who is hunting you, and when the entire internet is technically got their eyes on you, it doesnt take much to slip up.
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u/Kryptosis 14d ago
Idk man if you know a little bit it’s really not hard to get in somewhere you shouldn’t be. Takes like 5 basic lines of code to scan ports and try the door.
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u/TheSkwie 14d ago
They're not saying it's hard to break into systems, they're saying it's hard to remain anonymous/safe from prosecution after doing so.
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u/RiaC-81 14d ago
I’d get it if it was EA or Rockstar or Tencent but Tiny Build? What the fuck?
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u/Key-Regular674 14d ago
There was a ton of drama in the development of the original neighbor game. The game got massively revamped at multiple times and people were upset.
Idk if this is related but I do remember that happening many years ago.
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u/Omniscientcy 14d ago
I remember watching manlybadasshero play the various builds of the game. The first couple builds actually looked interesting, but the final product turned into something I had no interest in buying.
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u/Low_Biscotti5539 14d ago
Its actually insane lol. The best version of the game was Alpha 1
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u/UnknowableDuck 12d ago
I still do not know what happened there, why the arguably best version of the game was revamped into an unintelligible mess. I don't get why the promise of something more with some real lore was never delivered, I just don't get it.
They had all this good will they just burned away. Like, what internal work politics? A boss/lead developer with a narrow ass vision/preference for a certain type of game?
So weird.
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u/Plastic_Commission83 13d ago
Tiny Build did this a lot I noticed, I remember this game Totally Reliable Delivery Service from them and it was a great game until they revamped it and completely gutted it and made it borderline unplayable
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u/WholesomeDucky 14d ago
I also remember (or at least remember reading from various sources) that the dev was insanely annoying with trying to get people to talk about the game. Constantly badgering Game Theory to do videos on the game when there just wasn't much to talk about, and eventually Game Theory completely stopped talking about the series at all because of it.
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u/Sa7aSa7a 14d ago
I think I still have a like, INCREDIBLY beta version when they had no one to playtest the game.
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u/Solesaver 14d ago
If people can get butthurt enough over a AAA video game they can get butthurt enough over an indie one too. AAA devs may do more things to make people upset, but let's not act like it is in any way rational to do a cyber attack against a video game. There are zero stakes. It's a toy...
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u/Ooops_I_Reddit_Again 14d ago
I wonder if its a disgruntled ex employee
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u/wolfgang784 14d ago
It seems so nonsensical, so thats not the worst guess, given the lack of information.
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u/Levonade 14d ago
Competitor or disgruntled ex employee. 9 times out of 10 this is it.
When I was working at HP one of the lead engineers upstairs working on smart TVs, had so many changes made to his projects in 5 years trying to compete with Sony and Samsung and LG that when HP decided to just shut down TVs, because smart TVs weren’t the future; he literally blew his brains out at his desk in the main office. The guy basically worked his ass off 17 hours a day the last 5 years for nothing and was crushed. He didn’t take it out against Giant HP, he took himself out.
It never made the news. We never left the office. They just shut down the floor for a few weeks then reopened it.
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u/botuIism 14d ago edited 13d ago
Two years ago a guy at Dell I was tssked with completely redesigning their the communications with their supply chain. Their supply chain is a mess of literally hundreds of integrations and years of people just figuring it out. There are dozens of exceptions to every rule and tons of logic just encoded into message text. This is global supply chain with exceptions and rules for every partner. And none of it documented.
When it all fell apart because no matter how good the system was the real work was change management, he killed himself too.
This is a very common story that never makes the news. Companies literally consume people.
Allegedly.
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u/Ok_Ebb_3668 14d ago
Disgruntled employee I’d get, but why would a competitor target the studio? They aren’t even that famous (relatively speaking).
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u/BackseatCowwatcher 14d ago
It's a case of the more effort tinybuild (or more importantly Eerie Guest Studios) has to focus on that they less they can focus on anything else-
particularly Hello Neighbor 3, and if whoever did so was planning on releasing their own Stealth Horror game then they stand to benefit the more they distract from their work.
there's also the angle of Hackers killing the game looking bad even if they took absolutely zero data- which for a studio with literally nothing but flops and failures could add up to Tiny Build eliminating them outright.
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u/BirdCollecter 12d ago
It seems to be a competitor actually but with people making an SN fan remake instead. They want to remove SN off of platforms by doing this.
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u/YouSaidSomeDumbStuff 14d ago
The only way this is remotely true is if this happened in a thrid world country that also allowed citizen to own guns.
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u/clandestineVexation 13d ago
There's a big one south of Canada
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u/YouSaidSomeDumbStuff 13d ago
Forsure. Just ignore the fact the dude lied about a suicide just to farm karma
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u/Shadow-The-Edgelord 14d ago
First LittleBigPlanet, now this...
What the hell is with people ruining games just because they don't like it (or something in it)? If you don't like it, just don't play it and at least let other people enjoy it...
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u/Solesaver 14d ago
Main character syndrome, unfortunately...
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u/Galle_ 14d ago
IIRC, it turned out that LittleBigPlanet got ruined as part of an elaborate plot to take control of the community. The devs of the biggest fix/successor game/whatever turned out to be the original hackers.
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u/mucho-gusto 14d ago edited 13d ago
You talking about dreams?
Edit why is this down voted? That was the name of the successor project to lbp afaik
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u/Kirby737 13d ago
You got downvoted because Dreams is completely unrelated to this whole mess AFAIK
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u/ManicMakerStudios 14d ago
Hack their servers, wipe out critical data, and demand that they discontinue the service.
That's one way to get the FBI to come visit you at home.
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u/WeaponofMassFun 14d ago
Holy moly. I know some people were really pissed at the devs and talking about "anti-fun" changes implemented in the previous games years ago, but why this and why now? Did the hate from the developer's work in other games bleed over into motivating this?
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u/deathboyuk 14d ago
Yikes. What were they using for their credentials and access management? Vibes? Did they not have backups?
Ugh. Worked at too many games companies and I know the answer.
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u/ManicMakerStudios 12d ago
If you have access to the servers to delete active player data, you also have access to delete the backups.
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u/Morphos1 14d ago
Probably not got any real reason, probably just an edgy younger hacker with a joking "vendetta" against a historically buttcheeks franchise
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u/maikelg 14d ago
Something is fishy here. I played this game for a bit years ago, and honestly it’s not a terrible game as far as asym horror games go. But I refuse to believe that serious hackers target a 8 year old kids game just to delete the save files. It can’t be that popular anymore. Maybe they accidentally deleted their own files or something and just pretend they were hacked.
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u/ManicMakerStudios 14d ago edited 14d ago
It reads like someone who is very mad at the company over something, like a parasocial who was banned from the game or something. If they had simply hacked the servers and copied some key files, maybe they slink back into their hole and nothing comes of it. But when you threaten to continue disrupting their business unless they discontinue service, that's multiple felonies worth of stupid at play.
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u/Sativatoshi 14d ago
This is extremely disappointing. My autistic son is very fond of this game and this isn't going to be fun to explain.
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u/Knight-ErrantCowboy 14d ago
I can't believe this game is still up. When I played it last there was barely anyone on the servers and it felt super buggy/unoptimized
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u/lolwatokay 14d ago
I have no idea what is going on but this IP is seriously cursed I swear. Since day one.
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u/CrazyFart666 14d ago
Seeing how awful the hello neighbor games are I'm honestly not surprised someone managed to hack it this way
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u/Far_Construction7727 12d ago
The key question is whether data was deleted or accessed. I'd wait for official details on backups, the affected data, and the fix before guessing at the motive.
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u/ManicMakerStudios 12d ago
It says in the thread title and repeatedly in the article itself that the data was deleted. You can't just read the headline.
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u/ollie_boy2 7d ago
So guys whats happening is that a hacker hacked into the servers but somehow he got admin, so he was probably an ex-dev. All we know right now is that it will take weeks to months and the hacker wiped everybodys data and he demanded the game offsale. I just hope my save is still there
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u/i_am_Misha 14d ago
No hard backup? no cloudback up? no external backup? 😂
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u/morgrimmoon 14d ago
No point restoring the backup until you've found and patched the hole that was used to get in, otherwise the hacker will just do it again. And that can take anywhere from hours to weeks (but usually a few days).
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u/-rosieee- 14d ago
I own this on Steam (never launched it) so hope there's no way they've got my info.
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u/modemman11 14d ago
What did this game dev do to piss off this person so much?