The Moglievich gang did not attack the servers of Tim Sweeney’s company, so no data was stolen.

Last week, we reported on the alleged ransomware attack that stole nearly 200 gigabytes of data from Epic Games’ servers on February 28. It has since been revealed that it was all a hoax, and not just by Epic, but by Moglievich as well. The name comes from Semion Moglievich, a well-known figure in the Russian underworld, and it is alleged that names, passwords, full names, payment information, and source code were stolen. The problem is that it was all a massive forgery.

It was suspicious that the team didn’t even disclose the amount they were asking for, as is common in ransomware attacks, and there was no evidence that they were actually able to attack Epic Games’ servers. Cyber Daily reported that a link, which in theory contained the stolen data but in practice did not, pointed to a message advertising the services of Moglievich, the “professional scammers”…

“There is currently no evidence that Mogilevich’s ransomware claims are legitimate. Mogilevich has not contacted Epic, nor has he provided any evidence of the veracity of the claims. When we saw these claims, which were a screenshot of a darkweb site in a tweet, we investigated within minutes and reached out to Mogilevich for proof. Mogilevich did not respond. We continued to investigate, and our investigation is complete. The group’s claims were never legitimate – this was a scam,” Epic wrote.

Their spokesman, named Pongo, said that the databases listed on their blog were not real and focused on the big names to get them seen as quickly as possible. The goal was not to gain notoriety, but to meticulously build their scams with victims to be scammed. Through false claims and social engineering, they bilked people out of more and more money. First they sold their non-existent hacking services to eight people for a thousand dollars each, then when they paid it was two thousand dollars, and the Chinese drone manufacturer DJI had to pay 85 thousand dollars for materials stolen in their hack, but again they have no proof that this happened, so they could have cheated here too.

The team just wanted to make a point and show the process of their fraud. They don’t consider themselves hackers, just criminal geniuses. They’ve taught a lot of people (including Epic Games) a lesson, and they’re just promoting their network…

Source: PCGamer, Cyber Daily