An 18-year-old hacker was handed an indefinite hospital order as punishment for his part in exposing clips of the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto game.
Arion Kurtaj, an autistic individual from Oxford, was an essential part of the international gang Lapsus$.
The group's raids on high-tech companies such as Uber, Nvidia, and Rockstar Games resulted in a financial damage of almost $10m for them.
The judge declared Kurtaj to be a great danger to the public, given his aptitude and eagerness to perpetrate cyber-crime.
He will stay at a safe hospital indefinitely unless medical practitioners decide he is not a threat anymore.
It was brought to the court's attention that Kurtaj had exhibited violent behavior while in custody, with over thirty accounts of physical harm or destruction of property noted.
The jury was asked to determine whether Kurtaj had committed the alleged acts, yet because of his acute autism, doctors ruled him not fit to stand trial, thereby removing any consideration of criminal intent.
A mental health evaluation conducted for the purpose of the sentencing hearing indicated that he "persisted in voicing his aim to go back to cybercrime immediately. His determination is strong."
The jury was informed that even while out on bail after being arrested for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE, and still under police protection in a Travelodge hotel, he proceeded to carry out additional hacking activities culminating in his most notorious hack.
Kurtaj was able to access Rockstar, the firm behind GTA, despite having his laptop taken away, using an Amazon Firestick, a hotel TV as well as a mobile phone.
Kurtaj pilfered 90 clips o the not yet released and highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.
He hacked into the company's internal Slack messaging platform and threatened that if Rockstar did not reach out to him on the Telegram app within 24 hours, he would begin to distribute the source code.
He subsequently shared the video clips and underlying code on a forum, operating under the handle TeaPotUberHacker.
He was taken into custody again and held until his court date.
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During Kurtaj's sentencing hearings, his defence lawyers contended that the success of the game's trailer showed that his breach had not inflicted serious damage on the game producer and asked that this be taken into account when deciding on a sentence.
However, Judge Lees asserted that the harm and victimhood resulting from the other breaches caused by Lapsus$ were indeed real.
Rockstar Games informed the court that the hack cost them approximately $5 million to repair, as well as spanned across many hours of their staff's time.
A 17-year-old individual, who is unable to be identified due to his age, from the Lapsus$ collective was convicted during the six-week-long proceeding held at Southwark Crown Court.
He collaborated with Kurtaj and other individuals affiliated with Lapsus$ to execute a hack on the tech giant Nvidia and telecom company BT/EE, which resulted in the theft of data. A ransom of four million dollars was requested but not rewarded.
They also took money straight from individuals' cryptocurrency wallets.
At seventeen, the individual was given an eighteen month long Youth Rehabilitation Order involving close monitoring and an embargo on VPNs on the web.
In addition to having committed hacking offences, the boy was also sentenced for a "disturbing and frightening pattern of harassment and stalking" targeted at two youthful females, according to the judge.
Kurtaj and the 17-year-old are the first individuals to be found guilty of being members of Lapsus$, and it is believed that other members are still at large.
The exploits of the group from the UK and reportedly Brazil in 2021 and 2022 left cyber-security circles stunned. They were referred to as "digital bandits" in court.
It is believed that the group was mainly composed of teenagers, who employed strategies like those of con-artists and also hacked into multinational giants such as Microsoft, the well-known tech titan, and Revolut, an electronic banking company.
The hackers were brazenly celebrating their acts on social network app Telegram, mocking victims in both English and Portuguese throughout their criminal conduct.
US cyber-authorities released a comprehensive report in response to Lapsus$ and other teenage hacker groups.
The findings of Lapsus$ demonstrated that its members, even including some minors, could infiltrate heavily protected companies with great ease.
It is uncertain what profits Lapsus$ was able to accrue from its cyber-attacks. No organizations openly admitted to remitting funds to the intruders and the attackers did not disclose the codes to held digital currency accounts.
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