British teen from the Lapsus$ gang hacks GTA 6 details in a small town hotel room using an Amazon Fire Stick. Despite compromising British telcos, he’s exposed, caught by authorities, and leaks GTA 6 footage after using the Fire Stick to access cloud services and breach organizations. The tale highlights untapped talent and lack of support in his education system.
Also highlights the fact that government agencies are doing Rockstar’s dirty work. Think you’ll ever see this level of investigation for someone’s account hacked for nudes or identity theft? Nope, only corpos worth multi-billions get expensive, in depth investigations paid for by tax dollars.
The kid also stole 14m dollars and was already caught for his previous hacks into other companies.
The story is more interesting than the title suggests! This guy was arrested for hacking two telecom companies, got released under investigation, then immediately hacked Nvidia before being put under house arrest. After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.
All in all, he’s believed to have stolen $14 million+. By the way… he’s 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education school.
The fact he used a FireTV stick to hack Rockstar is pretty impressive lol
I’m guessing those things run Linux. So you would just need a shell.
Though I’m guessing term of his house arrest didn’t allow him to have a keyboard. That part has me curious.
They run Android, so not really standard Linux, but yeah.
Install an Android app that lets you ssh into something, bingo bango, you have a full Linux terminal
bingo bango
what’s up with this phrase coming back into style?
So either a remote control or voice control.
Anyway, kid has too much time on his hands, lol.
Rock, fire, stick… there’s a theme
Yeah, the theme is “Don’t underestimate Neanderthals, they’re pretty much the granddaddy of Homo sapiens”. Or in short, “primitive, not unintelligent”.
… what?
After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.
Fuckin’ bravo. I mean, don’t do that, but on a purely technical level - nice.
I mean, why not do that? I get it’s illegal, but morally? Why not?
Well, between getting doxxed and annihilating any chance he had at getting a lenient sentencing, the more sensible decision would have probably been to sit on his hands and bide time for a couple months lol.
Given he’s autistic, that’s probably actually impossible for him to do.
Well in that case I guess he’s been cursed by fate in an uncaring world 🤷
But at least we can punish him. Eh?
That’ll teach him for being congenitally neurodivergent.
There’s no ethical use of ransomware.
<.< Ransomwareing putins computers?
deploying Godwin’s Law
Oh yeah? What about ransomware-ing NAZI’s and Hitler?
Is that immoral?
Probably, since you’d have time travel, but not just shoot the bastards.
He didn’t just steal content. He then tried to blackmail the company to not release the content he stole.
Also, while you might be able to justify piracy of a released product in various ways (the common argument is that the would be pirate wouldn’t have paid for the product anyway and digital goods don’t have any cost to the developer from pirating them). But when the product hasn’t been released yet, then it has a much bigger cost because the pirated copy is the only option available and thus it can eat into actual sales. The inability to go through with their planned launch (something big publishers will spend millions hyping) and the release of an unfinished product can absolutely have financial damages. It’s hard to recover from a bad launch.
And that’s without getting into the fact that hackers like this don’t usually stop at just leaking video games or the likes. They’ll also often steal people’s personal information. It’s a lot easier to see the moral issues when it’s your information being stolen.
Financial losses at a corporation aren’t harm, they’re just part of doing business.
Prior to reading your comment, I considered myself to be a skilled software developer.
It always warms my heart when a single person is able to outsmart large multi-million/billion dollar tech companies like Nvidia and Rockstar. Really shows how piss poor these companies security can be.
I would definitely look to hire that kid with a high wage just to make sure he doesn’t hacke me again, if I were one of the companies he hacked into. Companies should really think about trying to hire these hackers because then the threats against them might go down ever so slightly.
I would definitely look to hire that kid with a high wage just to make sure he doesn’t hacke me again, if I were one of the companies he hacked into. Companies should really think about trying to hire these hackers because then the threats against them might go down ever so slightly.
I understand your thought, but some people just want to watch the world burn and you definitely don’t want to bring that sort inside.
This guy seems to be driven, capable and lacking the common sense to know when to stop.
Da fuck…
Waiting for the movie btw 🍿.
Jesus Christ, this man is a criminal Tony Starks
Was reading Hackaday’s source article on BBC and came across this:
That did not deter the duo who continued hacking with Lapsus$ and successfully breached Nvidia, a Silicon Valley tech giant that makes chips for artificial intelligence chatbots, in February 2022.
That’s a funny as fuck way of classifying Nvidia.
