Sony investigation finds hackers, not unhappy devs, leaked The Last of Us Part II

The Last of Us Part Part II has suffered a major leak that has revealed the ending and important plot points throughout the story two weeks ago.

Since then, Sony and Naughty Dog have conducted investigations to understand how that was possible and ended with a solution to the case.

According to Jason Schreier, former Kotaku reporter, the game was leaked by hackers and not by unhappy Naughty Dog developers, as someone had shared last week.

In a series of tweets, Schreier says he’s talked to Naughty Dog employees and discovered that “hackers found a security vulnerability in a patch for an older ND game and used it to get access to ND’s servers.”

The leak didn’t happen as an act of protest nor anything like that, but did feature “devs playing an early build” of the PS4 exclusive.

Twitter user PixelButts confirms this version and adds more details about how this possibly happened, based on 1-3 TB of game content that was available on Naughty Dog’s servers.

“Every ND game has a “final” patch that is pushed to the game that contains an Amazon AWS key, that when paired with a secret bucket ID it will give full access to the server’s contents,” he said on Twitter.

PixelButts claims the vulnerability was discovered around the end of January, so it took a little work before hackers could find what they needed throughout the server’s data and spread it over the Internet for some reason.

This finding is most likely the bottom line, but that doesn’t mean players are safe from spoilers.

While the investigation is over, leaks are still on the Internet, so users are strongly suggested to stay on the alert in order not to watch leaked content or other players openly discussing the major story points that have been leaked around.

The Last of Us Part II has a new release date, which happens to be June 19. Ghost of Tsushima was consequently moved to July.