The teen hacker behind the hacks of Nvidia and Uber used an Amazon Fire Stick from a hotel room to hack Rockstar Games and leak unfinished Grand Theft Auto 6 footage, according to a report by BBC.
Recent court proceedings revealed that Arion Kurtaj, then 17, was originally arrested on Jan. 22, 2022, for hacking several telecom companies but was released while under an investigation, only to hack yet again the next month.
Kurtaj is just one of the members of “an international cyber-crime gang responsible for a hacking spree against major tech firms,” according to BBC. The group is known as Lapsus$.
In February 2022, the hackathon continued, this time using their hacking skills to breach Nvidia, makers of GeForce graphics cards. They leaked sensitive information and demanded a ransom and were arrested again on March 31, 2022.
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Kurtaj was doxxed by rival hackers before being arrested, according to the BBC report, so he was taken and moved into a Travelodge hotel in Bicester, U.K., for his own safety. He had “strict bail conditions including a ban from going on the internet,” but even that did not stop him.
The hack of Rockstar Games, leading to the leak of 90 video clips of the work-in-progress GTA 6, was done from the privacy of the hotel. In what was called a “flagrant disregard for his bail conditions,” Kurtaj used an “Amazon Fire Stick in his hotel TV,” which allowed the hacker “to connect to cloud computing services with a newly purchased smart phone, keyboard and mouse.”
Kurtaj and an unnamed, underage accomplice accessed the Rockstar Games Slack and posted that he was an “attacker” and asked for the developer to contact him within 24 hours or he would release sensitive information.
Later in 2022, the gameplay clips were leaked, showing an early version of GTA 6, featuring two playable characters in what looks like a modern-day version of Vice City.
In September 2022, Kurtaj was arrested again and has been in custody ever since. Kurtaj remains in custody while the investigation and court case continues.
