Hacker steals internal Roblox documents in extortion attempt

A hacker has stolen a cache of internal documents from Roblox in a bid to extort the popular gaming platform.

That's according to Motherboard, which reviewed a handful of documents and said they relate to some of the most popular Roblox games and creators.

Roblox itself has confirmed the security breach in a statement to Motherboard and said it is refusing to cooperate with the hacker.

"These stolen documents were illegally obtained as part of an extortion scheme that we refused to cooperate with. We acted quickly upon learning of the incident, engaged independent experts to complement our information security team and have tuned our systems to seek to detect and prevent similar attempts," said a company spokesperson.

The company added that it has been actively investigating a phishing incident that resulted in a Roblox employee being targeted by cyber criminals.

This isn't the first time Roblox workers have been targeted by malicious parties. Back in May 2020, it was reported by Motherboard that a hacker had been bribing a Roblox staffer in order to gain access to back end customer support panels and the personal information of Roblox users, including email addresses and passwords.

Roblox's presence within the industry has grown exponentially in recent years, with the game creation platform boasting 54.1 million daily average users as of March 31, 2022.

According to the company's latest fiscal report, those users drove $537 million in revenue, representing a year-on-year increase of 39 percent. Despite that uptick, bookings -- which is money spent on virtual currency in Roblox -- decreased by roughly 3 percent to $631.2 million.

Earlier this year, Roblox also made inroads into the virtual event business with the launch of the month-long Roblox Deveopers Conference, a digital conference designed to teach budding creators how to make better games and experiences on the platform.