Rainbow Six servers back online after apparent hack

[Eric]

3 days ago
Peter GillibrandBBC Newsbeat
Ubisoft A promotional picture for Rainbow Six Siege featuring 5 soldiers looking into the camera from different militaries. The UK one is front and centre wearing a yellow gas mask and carrying a shotgun. Ubisoft
Rainbow 6 Siege, a tactical team-based shooter, has been a successful title for Ubisoft

Ubisoft, one of the world's largest games developers, says it's working to fix an apparent hack on popular online shooter Rainbow Six Siege.

Servers for the tactical multiplayer game were taken offline on Saturday and Sunday after in-game currency thought to be worth millions of pounds was distributed to players.

The company has since restored service, but suspended the game's marketplace until further notice and warned players they may face queues when trying to log on.

In a statement on X, Ubisoft said it would continue to make "investigations and corrections" over the next two weeks.

Rainbow Six Siege, commonly referred to as R6, has been a success story for Ubisoft, which is also behind the Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series.

The game has a steady base of regular players and its own dedicated esports tournaments.

It's currently free to play, but generates income for the company through in-game purchases of cosmetic items via its online marketplace.

Ubisoft has not officially described the weekend's incident as a hack, but did acknowledge issues that affected the game over the weekend.

According to reports, R6 players were each sent 2 billion credits - estimated to be worth $13.3m (£9.9m) if they'd been bought legitimately.

Screenshots also showed messages containing defamatory statements appearing for some users.

In response, Ubisoft shut down its R6 servers and began to work on a "roll back" - essentially rewinding the clock so any purchases made prior to Saturday could be undone.

The company said any irregular messages were not sent by its team members, and added that no-one would be banned for spending credits they had received.
A screenshot of the server status website which says "service status" and "updated December 28, 2025 1:51pm". There's also a list of consoles and PC which says "Unplanned outage" in red next to the names.
The server status website showed the game down across PC and all consoles

Journalist James Lucas, who has been covering the story for website The Gamer, says it's unusual to see an attack on this scale on such a high-profile title.

"You could empty the store a dozen times over," says James.

James adds that the timing of the outage, during the lucrative Christmas period, comes at a particularly bad time for Ubisoft.

"We talk about Christmas noobs, people who get the game for the first time over the holidays," says James.

"The marketplace is disabled, so there's no way to buy in-game items any more.

"All of that money is sitting on the table now because they can't spend anything on the game."

Long-term players are also affected, says James, with some still missing purchased items.

"I think it shows a really big vulnerability," says James.

"If a hacker can gain access to your backends, even with a backup, your game or at least your marketplace could go offline for weeks."

James added that reports of a wider attack, with hackers gaining access to data linked to unreleased Ubisoft games, appeared to be untrue.

Gaming hacks are relatively rare but there have been some high-profile examples.

One of the biggest was in 2011, when PlayStation Network was taken offline for 24 days.

About 70 million accounts were compromised, and UK regulators fined Sony £250,000 with UK authorities saying it "could have been prevented".

Developer Rockstar was among a series of major companies targeted in a series of hacks in 2021 and 2022.

Early footage of its upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 was leaked, and a teenager was eventually sentenced in a UK court over the attack.

And Ubisoft itself was the victim of a 2013 hack that resulted in user account data being stolen.

[Eric]

Attackers Caused So Much Havoc Inside Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft Shut Down the Whole Game

u/Inquisitive_idiot avatar
Inquisitive_idiot
•
4d ago

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-rainbow-six-siege-breach-gives-players-billions-of-credits/
359
u/fork_yuu avatar
fork_yuu
•
3d ago

One group claims to have exploited a Rainbow Six Siege service to manipulate bans and in-game inventory without accessing user data.

A second group allegedly exploited a MongoDB instance using MongoBleed to pivot into Ubisoft's internal Git repositories, claiming to steal a large archive of internal source code from the 1990s to the present.

A third group claims to have stolen Ubisoft user data via MongoBleed and is attempting to extort the company into paying a ransom.

A fourth group disputes some of these claims, stating that the second group had access to Ubisoft's source code for a while.

Did they post this on some forum so every script kiddie went wild on them?
612
u/ClosetLadyGhost avatar
ClosetLadyGhost
•
3d ago

Lol the groups are fighting among themselves as well.
226
WeirdSysAdmin
•
3d ago

Who is the fourth group that is like “nah man we weren’t stealing anything but we were watching everyone else steal shit and they are lying”?

Also MongoBleed is massive right now, people wait for things like this and then hit the targets they know have mongo and have what they want.
124
GunnieGraves
•
3d ago

I swear, the people in charge of naming some of this software hang out with the people in charge of naming weed strains.
80
u/chop-diggity avatar
chop-diggity
•
3d ago

Telegram for Mongo.
16
maybe-an-ai
•
3d ago

This is called being thoroughly and complete pwoned.
8
u/Lettuce_bee_free_end avatar
Lettuce_bee_free_end
•
3d ago

So I wonder if their cyber attack is real ? I read 900GB holding all old and new titles was copied by infiltrators.
220
xstagex
•
3d ago

Seem not real. Someone used an AI to make article and it slopped wrong data from the past. So for now seem to be spreading misinformation, other then the fact that got hacked and players banned etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iVim3QibA&list=LL&index=3
110
u/JoyousBlueDuck avatar
JoyousBlueDuck
•
3d ago

It was far more than players getting banned. The entire market got nuked (before the rollback) and millions of players temporarily became "billionaires" in game. They even hijacked the kill feed and global ban notifications to sing a song to every single player online LOL
63
u/varateshh avatar
varateshh
•
3d ago

Apparently multiple groups with different goals infiltrated Ubisofts network. First group were script kiddies that played around with rainbow six siege, second stole source code/tools from older games, third stole user data and is now attempting to ransom this data. An exploit (Mongobleed) made public in December 19th likely played a role in all these groups gaining access at the same time. Fixes are slow because almost everyone was on Christmas holiday. It's a mess and there could be more groups lurking in the background.

Vxunderground is an online repository for malware that has been around 2019 so I assume they know what they are talking about.
19
u/ColbyAndrew avatar
ColbyAndrew
•
3d ago

The font on that website is atrocious.
40
[deleted]
•
3d ago

Appropriate for the garbage writing
13
u/thatfreshjive avatar
thatfreshjive
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3d ago

This reminds me of the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline 's payment system, where the company shut down their entire transport network, affecting millions, because there was a possibility they may lose a few bucks
203
u/Kastenbrot avatar
Kastenbrot
•
3d ago

I hate oil and gas companies as much as the next guy, but shutting down the pipeline was part of their response to ransomware. They didn't want it to jump the gap from IT to OT and protected their operational systems. They didn't want to try how well their recovery procedures worked for the OT side. Worst case the outage could have been a lot longer, because odds are, that backups wouldn't work if they even exist. This was not to save a few bucks, but the safest way to get back underway as quickly as possible.
247
davvblack
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3d ago

and it’s conceptually possible that OT malware would cause permanent physical damage, as la stuxnet (but oilier)
84
u/Bodefosho avatar
Bodefosho
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3d ago

What’s OT mean in this context?
29
u/Palimon avatar
Palimon
•
3d ago

That's how it should be done tho...

If it was an actual ransomware their infrastructure is at risk and remediation and recovery becomes at lot harder if it spreads.

It's better to shut everything down, let the cyber team do the forensics and then continue than risking having a week or two of downtime because every server on your infra got encrypted.
24
Nasmix
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3d ago

Bad take. You need to get to a known good state and protect as much as you can from spread and larger damage. It’s not about saving a few bucks at that point - it’s about minimizing the long term damage and recovering as quickly as possible while doing so
45
grannyte
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3d ago

Game as no service LOL
18
WorldlyPlace
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3d ago

I'd kill to be a fly on the wall at ubisoft. How do you even respond to something like this. Like who makes the call to nuke the game.
11
u/RapidEngineering342 avatar
RapidEngineering342
•
3d ago

It would be really nice if this finally killed off siege. Fucking bastard waste of the R6 name.
65
u/Ghostfistkilla avatar
Ghostfistkilla
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3d ago

Yes please let's go back to Rainbow Six Vegas or Rogue Spear the new generation doesn't know what they are missing out on R6 was solid back in the 2000s.
27
u/man__i__love__frogs avatar
man__i__love__frogs
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3d ago

Used to play R6, Rogue Spear, Urban OP's, Covert OP's on MPlayer and Gamespy back in the day. Ghost Recon 1 was great too.
6
Vehlin
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3d ago

Or back to the original R6. If things got loud you did it wrong.
10
ThankuConan
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3d ago

If shareholders get stiffed the damage will be even greater and might be fatal. Nothing like investors losing confidence to put a dagger in your heart.
3
Long_Replacement3715
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3d ago

No rollback? Wow.
89
u/ciaervo avatar
ciaervo
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3d ago

No?

"In a final update, Ubisoft clarified that players would not be punished for spending the granted credits, but that it would be rolling back all transactions made since 11:00 AM UTC."
203
stamatt45
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3d ago

In the article it says theyre doing a rollback
73
u/p0tsataja avatar
p0tsataja
•
3d ago

You presume ubisoft has working backups
130
u/Computer-Blue avatar
Computer-Blue
•
3d ago

No, rollbacks!
23
Psychological-Bad959
•
3d ago

In all my years of gaming, I have never seen developers as horrible on seige.

Seige used to have great events and freebies like operation outbreak, a completely new limited gamemode with a free limited elite skin. Nowdays, its some shitty snowball fight game where you literally have to spectate other players from 10 miles away for 5 minutes when you die. Oh also they gave jack shit for the launch of seige 2

The monetization is horrible. You used to be able to buy 1 year battlepass for like 36 dollars, which was completely fair. Now, they removed that to like 15 dpllars a season AND added a different VIP membership that costs 10 dollars A MONTH.

Oh also now they release 50 dollar skins. And also have limited event skins that you need to need to unlock every other single skin that event, costing hundreds of dollars or time. And the other skins are literal lazy recolours.

The game never was able to handle hackers. I remember a month long period where EVERY OTHER match had a hacker on it. Blatant boosting services were common as hell too especially with a duo. Also ranked 2.0 is a dogshit ass system. Perhaps if they spent the insane amounts of money not on getting overwatch streamers who will never play that game again to stream it and instead they used it to solve the hacking issue, we would not have had blantant hackers weeks intk the games release.

Dont even get me started on balancing. I have no clue why the game thought that reworking blackbeard was necessary, especially into a shield operator which are particularly devisive.

I wish I could feel bad about the state of seige, but it has become so clear that their prioirities have changed to a cash grab.
10
u/Lanky-Assistance-120 avatar
Lanky-Assistance-120
•
3d ago

I'm super impressed that not once did you spell Siege right
27
10
u/Lanky-Assistance-120 avatar
Lanky-Assistance-120
•
3d ago

I'm super impressed that not once did you spell Siege right
27
27
Psychological-Bad959
•
3d ago

In all my years of gaming, I have never seen developers as horrible on seige.

Seige used to have great events and freebies like operation outbreak, a completely new limited gamemode with a free limited elite skin. Nowdays, its some shitty snowball fight game where you literally have to spectate other players from 10 miles away for 5 minutes when you die. Oh also they gave jack shit for the launch of seige 2

The monetization is horrible. You used to be able to buy 1 year battlepass for like 36 dollars, which was completely fair. Now, they removed that to like 15 dpllars a season AND added a different VIP membership that costs 10 dollars A MONTH.

Oh also now they release 50 dollar skins. And also have limited event skins that you need to need to unlock every other single skin that event, costing hundreds of dollars or time. And the other skins are literal lazy recolours.

The game never was able to handle hackers. I remember a month long period where EVERY OTHER match had a hacker on it. Blatant boosting services were common as hell too especially with a duo. Also ranked 2.0 is a dogshit ass system. Perhaps if they spent the insane amounts of money not on getting overwatch streamers who will never play that game again to stream it and instead they used it to solve the hacking issue, we would not have had blantant hackers weeks intk the games release.

Dont even get me started on balancing. I have no clue why the game thought that reworking blackbeard was necessary, especially into a shield operator which are particularly devisive.

I wish I could feel bad about the state of seige, but it has become so clear that their prioirities have changed to a cash grab.
10
u/Lanky-Assistance-120 avatar
Lanky-Assistance-120
•
3d ago

I'm super impressed that not once did you spell Siege right
27
u/Virtual-Oil-5021 avatar
Virtual-Oil-5021
•
3d ago

The last nail in the ubichiote business?
3
3
u/Virtual-Oil-5021 avatar
Virtual-Oil-5021
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3d ago

The last nail in the ubichiote business?
3
u/LeroySinclair avatar
LeroySinclair
•
3d ago

Maybe now they will put effort into a new installment instead of milking a 10 year old game
4