Image: Rockstar Games
A 17-year-old teenager from the UK has been arrested on suspicion of being behind the massive GTA 6 leak.
The London City Police has announced that a 17-year-old teenager from Oxfordshire has been arrested, “on suspicion of hacking,” allegedly in connection to the recent Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks, according to journalist Matthew Keys. The suspect was reportedly not just behind the cyber attack against Rockstar Games, but another one aimed at Uber too.
Last week’s Rockstar Games data breach was one of the biggest games industry leaks in recent memory, resulting in 90 different gameplay videos from GTA 6 circulating online from an early development build of the game. Keys reports that the teenager arrested for this leak had also been arrested earlier this year after hacking Microsoft and Nvidia, making this a repeat crime.
The suspect has been charged with, “two computer crimes and two counts of violating his bail.” Reportedly, the suspect is also associated with a hacking group called Lapsus$. The suspect also seems to have angered a group of ransomware threat actors after claiming to have access to additional leaked information from Kone, Bank of Brasil, DoorDash and Take-Two Games.
Rockstar Games recently confirmed that it had fallen victim to a network intrusion resulting in an, “extremely disappointing,” series of GTA 6 leaks. The company said, “We recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto.”
Uber confirmed last week that the FBI was now investigating a hack on its systems, thought to have been perpetrated by an individual or group associated with Lapsus$ - whom the London City Police reportedly have in custody now. Lapsus$ has a history of being associated with teenage hackers, as a 16-year-old was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of leading the group and being a, “multi-millionaire cyber-criminal.”
Remember that mission in GTA 5, where you play as Michael trying to hack an in-game parody of Facebook called LifeInvader? All you had to do was stroll into a building dressed as a millennial and install a bunch of spamware on a random computer. If a group of teenage hackers can hack into Rockstar Games, Microsoft, a Brazilian Bank and Samsung this year alone, maybe that mission wasn’t so over-the-top after all.
