Teen hacker behind GTA 6 leak detained indefinitely
A teenage hacker who leaked footage of the unreleased Grand Theft Auto 6 game online has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order under the Mental Health Act. Arion Kurtaj 18 year from Oxford, was part of the notorious Lapsus$ cybercrime gang that hacked and blackmailed several tech giants including Uber, Nvidia, BT, and Rockstar Games.
Kurtaj breached Rockstar Games’ servers in September 2023 and threatened to release the source code for the upcoming GTA 6 game, which has been eagerly awaited by millions of fans for over a decade. He also leaked clips of the game while on bail in a Travelodge hotel.
The court heard that Kurtaj and a 17-year-old accomplice, who cannot be named for legal reasons used various techniques to gain access to the companies data such as impersonating employees, spamming phones and exploiting vulnerabilities. They also stole nearly £100,000 from cryptocurrency accounts of five victims whose SIM details they obtained from hacking EE.
The duo were arrested twice in 2022, but continued their hacking spree with Lapsus$ a group of “digital bandits who communicated in English and Portuguese on the Telegram app. The 17-year-old also hacked the City of London Police’s cloud storage weeks after the force arrested him.
Both Kurtaj and the 17-year-old have autism and were deemed unfit to stand trial by psychiatrists. The jury was asked to determine whether they committed the acts alleged, not if they did it with criminal intent. The 17-year-old was convicted of three offences and acquitted of two while, Kurtaj was found to have committed 12 offences including three counts of blackmail, two counts of fraud, and six breaches of the Computer Misuse Act.
Grand Theft Auto is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, with over 405 million units shipped worldwide. The latest instalment GTA 5 was released in 2013 and generated £650m in worldwide revenue within 24 hours of its release. The release date of GTA 6 is still unknown, but the leak by Kurtaj and Lapsus$ has sparked speculation and excitement among gamers and critics.
