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.
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.
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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.
And… I mean, a criminal.
I’m not commenting on the moral issues but laws exist and they were broken.
There’s no ethical use of ransomware.
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<.< 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.
You’d also need to bring lots of computers with you and first convince the nazis to use them
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.
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Prior to reading your comment, I considered myself to be a skilled software developer.
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
It says he used cloud services so probably only needed a web browser
bingo bango
what’s up with this phrase coming back into style?
The article or maybe the comments said he accessed a cloud based Linux service using the FireStick and went to work from there.
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?
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.
that kid’s my hero
Jesus Christ, this man is a criminal Tony Starks
This has to be a movie plot…
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.Companies should really think about trying to hire these hackers because then the threats against them might go down ever so slightly
some companies do.
Counterpoint: he got caught. Whatever his offensive capabilities are, his security posture is evidently lacking. Recruiting a glass cannon like that might not work out if you’re looking for help with security hardening.
Seems like a person I like and would love to smoke a joint with, lol
He bought the fire stick from the shop right next to the hotel… how the heck did he get Linux on it? Or are they selling those bootleg fire sticks?
He used a rented server to hack Rockstar, the FireStick was merely a means to connect to it.
I feel guilty now because I bought a new monitor because my old screen space wasn’t cutting it.
Da fuck…
Waiting for the movie btw 🍿.
Rain Man 2
Exploit boogaloo
This is a bit of a crossover ep between the movie Hackers and the DS9 ep where Julian basically got introduced to a group of obviously coded autistic anarchists.
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.
It’s not inaccurate though. They do make a AI chips.
They probably make more than than they do GPUs now. Which is depressing.
Gaming GPUs are now only a small part of their revenue.
Sounds like something written by AI, ironically. That’s the most talked about thing for the moment, so that’s what it picks up on. It doesn’t care if it’s correct.
But it is correct now. Nvidia is making way more AI chips cards whatever then it is GPUs.
Nvidia now cares more about AI than gamers, and people now know more about them because the AI chips they make, I have an Nvidia GPU, but I’m looking to get an AMD GPU (Also and intel ARC will also be fine because I upgrade my power supply), I dislike Nvidia a lot now.
I like the Arc series as a concept, because they’re the only value-driven option. Nvidia is just about pumping power and AMD is about trying cool gimmicks like dual clocks and chiplets.
Eventually I hope that the Arc series contributes to an Intel chiplet series similar to the APUs available on handhelds.
Never underestimate a kid with free time
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 NSA has no idea whatever do you mean. /s
Good tldr
Technically impressive but also fuck this kid for all his counts of spreading ransomware and stealing user data to hack their accounts too.
Has anyone seen where to check the footage out?? Looks like it’s all been DMCA’d from the majority of the web… I’m not a huge GTA Stan but I kinda wanna see what got leaked!
It isn’t very interesting because it’s just a bunch of internal videos that people sent to each other for various reasons. And it’s all out of context because the context would have been provided in an email but we don’t ever see.
Sometimes I’m not sure what some of the footage is trying to demonstrate.
Also most of the animation stuff isn’t complete yet and the AI, at least in the videos I saw was brain dead. So it’s not really representative of the final product and it doesn’t really look like anything.
IIRC it looked a lot like GTA V with some debugging info added. Most changes seem to be under-the-hood.
It did look very similar to GTA V, but it’s also worth noting that pretty much all of the footage was from very early production. It’s likely that they were using less detailed character/world models for testing purposes. I imagine the game will look pretty damn good and modern once the proper lighting and textures are applied.
Ultimately I don’t remember anything incredibly interesting from the videos I saw outside of a couple of story beats revolving around the new main characters. It seemed like most of the videos were pretty much testing certain console and systems at non-specified points in game.
Wonderful
The moment of excitement in one’s hometown and the sensationalist reporting aside, we can’t help feeling sad that a teen with that level of talent evidently wasn’t given the support and encouragement by Oxfordshire’s education system necessary to put it to better use.
What a weird conclusion for the author to draw
Dunno why you’re getting so many downvotes… Even if someone disagrees, it’s a pretty reasonable thing to say.
Plus IMO it is kind of a non sequitur to say “if only the schools were better,” as though his motivations could have been satisfied with better homework assignments, lol.
I’m blessed by being on an instance that disables downvotes, so I hadn’t even noticed haha
power to the people right on
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