Rockstar Games
The GTA 6 hacker has been convicted to remain at a secure hospital for life
After months of legal procedures, the hacker behind the GTA6 leak from 2022 has been deemed a “high risk to the public”, resulting in his being held at a hospital for life as he has autism and is not fit for trial.
After having been assessed as “unfit for trial” by psychiatrists due to his autism, Lapsus$ hacker Arion Kurtaj has been served an indefinite hospital order. This means that he will be held at a “secure hospital” for the rest of his life, or until doctors deem him no longer a danger to society as he has verbally expressed a desire to commit more cyber crime, which established him as a “high risk to the public”. Should he be deemed fit to leave the hospital, he would then be forced to face a legal trial for his crimes.
Arion Kurtaj was a teenager when he was arrested for hacking Uber and Revolut, as well as attempting to blackmail Rockstar Games after leaking confidential videos of an early build of GTA VI. He leaked this information, including the game’s source code, after Rockstar refused to pay a ransom. Before that he had been accused of committing 12 crimes, among which are racketeering, fraud, and six other charges for violating the Computer Misuse Act for allegedly hacking NVIDIA and BT, although he has denied it.
Kurtaj, a member of Lapsus$ (a group dedicated to hacking), was arrested in September 2022 and brought to justice. The arrest happened in London, the city where the trial will take place. Prosecutors further accused him of threatening Rockstar to release the source code for the new Grand Theft Auto in a message sent to all company employees via Slack.
He is not the only one who has been arrested in the framework of this operation. Police have charged a 17-year-old man, whose name has not been provided, with blackmailing the broadband provider BT Group and mobile operator EE. Authorities hold them responsible for the NVIDIA hack, which occurred last February 2022. To make matters worse, prosecutor Kevin Barry has assured that the minor hacked into the London Police cloud storage weeks before being arrested.
While initially the defendant’s lawyers claimed that his actions had had no negative impact to Rockstar Games, as the recent trailer of Grand Theft Auto 6 was a huge success, the Judge stated that there were many real victims and real harm caused from his multiple other hacks on individuals and companies, including the theft of personal information from the BT/EE telecommunications companies, during which they threatened over 26,000 customers of said services through their phones.
Not the last hack for the video game industry
Just this week, another huge leak took place after ransomware group Rhysida gained access to Insomniac Games’ servers and obtained over 1.3 million internal files. They threatened Sony Interactive Entertainment directly, demanding a ransom of 2 million dollars, but after they refused they released nearly 1.7 TB of documents, images, and more. This includes information about Marvel’s Wolverine and other projects.
According to the group, obtaining the information was easy, as it took no more than 20-25 minutes to hack into the studio’s internal network. Sony, on its part, has announced that it is investigating the incident.