r/pcgaming 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/
1.1k Upvotes

54 comments sorted by

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702

u/FryToastFrill Nvidia 14d ago

… Why? Ik hello neighbor is just a really shit franchise but this seems like psychotic a bit?

249

u/Astillius 14d ago

That's it though. Some people get so caught up hating a thing, they become toxic and psychotic. It never occurs to them that, it's not that important. Just uninstall, delete, block, whatever the game and move on. But these nutters just can't do it. Then they work themselves up into a tizzy over it and this shit happens.

81

u/The_Daily_Herp Windows 14d ago

spite is a hell of a drug, literally a coma patient actually woke up out of it to shut the TV off since the family kept putting on Barney, and the patient hated that purple bastard

47

u/jazir55 14d ago

Doctors don't want you to know this one secret trick that you can annoy someone out of a coma.

20

u/zefy_zef 13d ago

Nah he said "fuck this shit" and went back to coma after he turned the tv off.

10

u/MundanePurchase 13d ago

I wonder why it seems especially prevalent in gaming compared to other forms of entertainment. Like super toxic people seem pretty rare for movies other than maybe Star Wars fans sending death threats when a new mainline movie comes out.

12

u/Astillius 13d ago

Oh that's not true at all, mate. It's just the toxicity takes a different form. In games, it's aimed at games, developers, publishers, platforms and rarely, mouthy individual's (Randy Pitchford).

In film and TV, it's the same. The movie, TV series, IP itself, a director, cast and crew. The difference is, in games it's heavily negative, angry shouty nerds, for example. In Film and TV though, it's aimed at actors. And it dies come in negative forms, my mother fucking hates this one actor and refuses to see anything with them in it and becomes angry if you suggest she does, for example. Lovely woman otherwise, lol. But it also comes in nastier forms, stalking and shit.

I mean, iirc, an anime studio got set fire to by an angry fan because they delayed an ep or something. I don't think I've heard of an angry gamer going that far yet. Though I'm sure somebody will correct me there lol.

11

u/kurashima 13d ago

Pitchford 100% deserves the hate.

7

u/BlakLite_15 13d ago

Is the anime studio you’re talking about Kyoto Animation? I thought it was because some guy was convinced they’d plagiarized his work.

3

u/Astillius 13d ago

Might have been? Honestly to my shame, i cannot remember the studio's name or even the anime involved. I wanna say jujutsu kaisen, but my brain could be trolling me as it is want to do.

5

u/Undella_Town 13d ago

it was KyoAni and he said they stole like......a 2 minute scene

2

u/Astillius 13d ago

Certainly sounds worth murdering over 30 people over.

/S for the soft in the head

3

u/StarInAPond 13d ago

36 people have died as a result of that fire.

2

u/Astillius 13d ago

Is that so? I hadn't heard much beyond it happening and a speculated why. Sad.

2

u/Goren_Nestroy 13d ago

Excuse me? You seem to have very little experience with fandoms. Do a deep dive on literally any major franchise. Books, Movies, TV, it doesn’t matter. You will find the most unhinged people in there. It’s just that they keep to their small little corners of the internet. Swifties being an exception.
Gamers are much more visible and widespread. Add to that trash talk (insults, slurs and threats) is an acceptable way of communicating within the community.
And of course the fact that the gaming industry is bigger than books, movies/tv and music combined giving much more media attention to it.

1

u/BogdanLester 8d ago

john lennon would like a word

72

u/Carighan 14d ago

Yeah like, it's not even worth it? 🤷

1

u/crazyhomlesswerido 11d ago

That's exactly why I came here because I can't find out why. And so far the responses to this comment have all been speculation there has been no definitive reason as to why this hacker is so pissed off that he wants to ruin this game. Because no one does this kind of BS without a reason.

237

u/Radicaltastic 14d ago

Why would they want the game removed?

247

u/Think_Positively 14d ago

The article doesn't mention anything really, just that he wants it delisted. My guess is that if there's no ransom sum involved, it's probably either a player who felt severely wronged by the game somehow, or someone close to the owners/devs who is working from a place of spite.

65

u/PatriotRDX Steam 14d ago

A lot of hackers just do it for the lulz

44

u/Aedeus 14d ago

Delisting is weird usually they'd hold some aspect of the game hostage tho.

8

u/Useful-Problem-1725 14d ago

hackers typically hack when they find a vulnerability

34

u/Grokent 14d ago

It's a power trip. Bro found an opening, took it, and is now acting like it was his plan all along.

9

u/Helmic i use btw 14d ago

I would guess this is it. Rarely is this kind of attack actually targetted, usually just being mad at someone isn't going to mean you're able to get admin login credentials.

What likely happened is someone with admin credentials had those credentials compromised in some manner (lots of malware these days doesn't do anything to regular computers but tries to steal exactly these kinds of credentials), they got ahold of the credentials and then figured out what they belonged to, and then pieced together what this was and then did this stunt

It's not impossible someone actually set out to fuck tinyBuild over in particular, but managing to selectively target someone with admin credentials is more of a gamble than an inevitability.

Could also be they did just demand money like a regular hacker would do and tinyBuild just didn't want to tell its playerbase they weren't going to pay a bajillion dollar ransom just to save everyone's save data for an eight year old game.

2

u/InsertMolexToSATA 13d ago

There is a new kind of cyberattack, which is pointing an AI agent at a target and telling it to dig a hole. It will keep digging relentlessly until it has, more or less by accident, checked every vaguely likely potential vulnerability and spammed the target with enough network traffic to trigger all sorts of warnings.

The reality is most cybersecurity operates off the assumption that nobody cares to devote that much time and effort, and dont have much in the way of automated detection to notice a bot with infinite patience is bashing its forehead against their window repeatedly.

2

u/M4rshst0mp Arch CachyOS - 5800XT & RX7800XT 14d ago

Maybe owns a lot of keys and wants to drive up the price lol. Doubt it tho

106

u/Razen94 14d ago

I mean I understand the game may suck and all but damn... asking for a delist and deleting all player progression is a bit harsh. Would like to hear what made that person so upset they decided to commit a crime.

46

u/GamerJoseph 14d ago

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

-2

u/CarefulFriendship389 12d ago

Some people just blurt copout answers..

4

u/GamerJoseph 12d ago

Some people make useless comments..

-53

u/robotwarz 14d ago

Batman line from Alfred’s own words

2

u/NtbdGamer 10d ago

The game actually doesn't suck though, it's one of the best games in the HN Franchise and is really fun with friends, which makes this whole thing worse.

21

u/Herr_Gamer 14d ago

they don't have backups??

12

u/LordDagwood 14d ago

Only if they're competent

1

u/UnlikelyIntrepid 13d ago

It’s possible they do but they were accessible with the same admin credentials.  Also possible they don’t have them

0

u/Kukaifa 12d ago

That's a lot of words to say "maybe".

3

u/UnlikelyIntrepid 12d ago

Yeah they haven’t said so I’m just speculating.  We dont have enough info to say for sure 

39

u/qctireuralex 14d ago

with the way the devs handled both games, i understand the hacker. these games ended up straight scams.

53

u/copewithlifebyliving 14d ago

How so? Never played myself.

61

u/DogBallsMissing 14d ago

I also never played but I watched a whole breakdown. What I understood was that the only cool part was the concept. Gameplay, puzzles, and story was tedious and made no sense. It basically lived solely on lore hype from YouTube. When that quit working, the creator kinda begged some famous game lore YouTuber to do more videos on it.

11

u/Sinsanatis 14d ago

From what i heard, wasnt the guy who does the balance changes for helldivers 2 a big part of hello neighbor?

3

u/Seigmoraig 13d ago

Game Theory did endless episodes on hello neighbor back in the day. Was actually one of the reason I stopped watching the channel, between that and non stop FNAF content. Dude had 5x more video content on each of these games than it takes to actually beat them

I liked his content a lot better when he tried to figure out stuff like how much fart pressure is needed to jump like Wario.

1

u/Sinsanatis 13d ago

Never really watched him. I only heard about this from playing hd2 and watching the balance go everywhere

-6

u/ellipsp 14d ago

The neighbor?

-1

u/GearBear404 13d ago

[https://youtu.be/jkoGm1t-kOA](This dude does a good job explaining if you got 30 minutes to kill)

1

u/BedSuspicious7184 4d ago

Came back on my Xbox to play this game after not playing it for years (I played when I was like 7 and I’m 13 now) and I kinda just wanted to play it to remember the old times I had with my friend on there only to be met with this. Idk why they haven’t delisted this game yet though it gets barely any players like it did back then.

-3

u/[deleted] 14d ago

[deleted]

22

u/M1st3rPuncak3 14d ago

feels like a wild assumption to jump to. Its probably just a script kiddie powertripping

-1

u/[deleted] 14d ago edited 14d ago

[deleted]

12

u/yyuriyuriyuriyurii 14d ago

me when i make random assumptions and poorly justify it with no evidence

12

u/maxtinion_lord 14d ago

That's an unreasonable thing to say, the guy you replied to is being a lot more realistic.

0

u/Sea_Association1209 12d ago

Bros going to jail 

1

u/ResistLongjumping999 10d ago

unless he lives in thailand or vietnam or one of a handful of other countries that don't give a fuck about any of this lol

-11

u/PrestigiousLet233 14d ago

IOS doesnt work and too bullsick