GSC Game World, developer of Stalker 2, announced that Russian hackers have gained access to an internal test build of the upcoming FPS "Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl" and have begun leaking stolen material to the public.

"Our team has identified a vulnerability exploited by a group of Russian hackers who have been attacking the company for almost a year and a half," the Ukrainian studio said on Twitter.

"Unfortunately, they were able to access and compromise some of our leaked information for the purpose of internal testing of various game aspects.

"For now, we kindly ask our stalkers and anyone else who wants to join the zone in the future not to view or share any material leaked from the game. These materials are only for testing purposes and are not releasable, but these leaks may ruin the experience of exploring the Zone for yourself."

GSC Gaming World does not say whether the attack is related to a reported attack in March in which hackers threatened to use the data they took "for extortion and blackmail," and there is no way to confirm whether the hackers are in fact Russian.

However, the timeline fits, stating in March that the studio has been dealing with "constant cyber attacks" for over a year and is now "almost a year and a half," and that the images and other files taken during the hack were the same accounts on the Russian social media platform VK were shared by.

It is also possible that the VK account is just being used as a distribution channel: one Google-translated message refers to "our administrators' contribution to the spread of this leak," suggesting that they were not actually responsible for making the leak happen. It also states that "an American was the first to discover it," but that the group administrator in question, Daniil Nexus, was "one of the first" to encounter the leak in that particular community and brought in someone else to crack the stolen code.

The apparent discovery of the vulnerability being exploited by hackers means that the hole has been plugged. Ukrainian studio GSC Gameworld is a high-profile target for Russian hackers and gamers, and there is an undeniable political dimension to it: in August 2022, a reportedly unreleased console port of "Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, leaked by a Russian streamer who complained, among other things, that the studio was raising funds to help train and equip Ukrainian soldiers fighting the Russian invasion.