The hacker, who was 18 years old, shared clips of a new Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game and has now been sent to a hospital for life.
Arion Kurtaj, an autistic Oxford student, was a key part of the international gang Lapsus$.
Tech companies like Uber, Nvidia, and Rockstar Games were attacked by the gang and lost almost $10 million.
The judge said Kurtaj was still a high risk to the public because he was good at cybercrime and wanted to do it.
He will always be locked up in a hospital until doctors decide he is no longer a threat.
The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while he was in jail, with dozens of reports of injuries or damage to property.
Doctors said Kurtaj couldn’t stand trial because he has serious autism, so the jury only had to decide if he did the things that were said he did, not if he did them on purpose.
This was written in a mental health report that was used in the sentence hearing: “He continued to say that he wanted to return to cybercrime as soon as possible.” His drive is very strong.
The jury was told that he kept hacking while he was out on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and under police protection at a Travelodge hotel. He did his most famous hack while he was there.
Even though his laptop was taken away, Kurtaj broke into Rockstar, the company that makes GTA, using an Amazon Fire Stick, his hotel TV, and his cell phone.
Kurtaj stole 90 clips of Grand Theft Auto 6, which hasn’t come out yet but is very much expected.
He got into the company’s Slack chat room and said, “If Rockstar doesn’t contact me on Telegram within 24 hours, I will start releasing the source code.”
After that, he used the username TeaPotUberHacker to post the video and source code on a forum.
He was caught again and held until his trial.
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The video for GTA 6 came out earlier this month and has been seen 128 million times on YouTube in just 4 days.
During the sentencing hearings, Kurtaj’s defense team said that the success of the game’s trailer showed that Kurtaj’s hack had not done much damage to the game creator and asked that this be taken into account when deciding the sentence.
That being said, Her Honor Judge Lees said that his other hacks on people and the companies he hit with Lapsus$ did real damage and hurt real people.
Rockstar Games was the only company that told the court that the hack cost them $5 million and a lot of staff time.
In the same six-week trial at Southwark Crown Court, another member of Lapsus$ was found guilty. He is 17 years old and cannot be named because of that.
Along with Kurtaj and other members of Lapsus$, he broke into tech giant Nvidia and phone company BT/EE to steal data. They then demanded a $4 million fee, which was not paid.
They also stole from people directly through their cryptocurrency lockers.
The 17-year-old was given a Youth Rehabilitation Order that includes close control and a ban on using VPNs online for 18 months.
The boy was also given a sentence for what the judge called a “unpleasant and frightening pattern of stalking and harassment” of two young women.
Kurtaj and the 17-year-old are the first members of the Lapsus$ group to be found guilty, but other members are likely still on the run.
The group’s bold strikes in 2021 and 2022 shocked people who work in cybersecurity. The group from the UK and maybe Brazil was called “digital bandits” in court.
It is thought that most of the gang members were teens. They got into big companies like Microsoft and the digital banking group Revolut by using con artist tricks and hacking into computers.
During their rampage, the hackers often brazenly praised their crimes in public and made fun of their victims on the English and Portuguese versions of the social network app Telegram.
It made US cyber-authorities write a long report about Lapsus$ and other computer gangs made up of teens.
It found that Lapsus$ “made clear just how easy it was for its members (juveniles, in some instances) to infiltrate well-defended organisations” .
It’s not clear how much money Lapsus$ has made from cybercrime. No companies openly said they paid the hackers, and the hackers did not give out the passwords to the cryptocurrency wallets they stole.
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