Peter Gillibrand<\/span>BBC Newsbeat<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In a statement on X<\/a>, Ubisoft said it would continue to make “investigations and corrections” over the next two weeks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n The game has a steady base of regular players and its own dedicated esports tournaments.<\/p>\n It’s currently free to play, but generates income for the company through in-game purchases of cosmetic items via its online marketplace.<\/p>\n Ubisoft has not officially described the weekend’s incident as a hack, but did acknowledge issues that affected the game over the weekend. <\/p>\n According to reports, R6 players were each sent 2 billion credits – estimated to be worth $13.3m (\u00a39.9m) if they’d been bought legitimately.<\/p>\n Screenshots also showed messages containing defamatory statements appearing for some users.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Journalist James Lucas, who has been covering the story for website The Gamer<\/a>, says it’s unusual to see an attack on this scale on such a high-profile title.<\/p>\n “You could empty the store a dozen times over,” says James.<\/p>\n James adds that the timing of the outage, during the lucrative Christmas period, comes at a particularly bad time for Ubisoft.<\/p>\n “We talk about Christmas noobs, people who get the game for the first time over the holidays,” says James.<\/p>\n “The marketplace is disabled, so there’s no way to buy in-game items any more.<\/p>\n “All of that money is sitting on the table now because they can’t spend anything on the game.”<\/p>\n Long-term players are also affected, says James, with some still missing purchased items.<\/p>\n “I think it shows a really big vulnerability,” says James. <\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n James added that reports of a wider attack, with hackers gaining access to data linked to unreleased Ubisoft games, appeared to be untrue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Gaming hacks are relatively rare but there have been some high-profile examples. <\/p>\n One of the biggest was in 2011, when PlayStation Network was taken offline for 24 days.<\/p>\n About 70 million accounts were compromised, and UK regulators fined Sony \u00a3250,000<\/a> with UK authorities saying it “could have been prevented”. <\/p>\n Developer Rockstar was among a series of major companies targeted in a series of hacks in 2021 and 2022.<\/p>\n Early footage of its upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 was leaked, and a teenager was eventually sentenced in a UK court over the attack<\/a>. <\/p>\n And Ubisoft itself was the victim of a 2013 hack that resulted in user account data being stolen<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Ubisoft](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/480\/cpsprodpb\/5308\/live\/1f90b130-e3d9-11f0-a09a-e7bcd1760d69.jpg.webp\")
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