He is autistic, 18 years old and British. Oxford-based Arion Kurtaj is also a leading member of the notorious Lapsus$ hacker group. He has now been sentenced to life imprisonment in a secure hospital.
The list of his crimes is long. At a young age, Arion Kurtaj, together with the hacker group Lapsus$, attacked companies such as Uber, Nvidia and, among others, Rockstar Games. Damage amounts to almost ten million dollars. In August he appeared before a London court. Due to his autism, the presiding judge only wanted a jury verdict on whether he was fit to stand trial and, more importantly, whether he had committed the crimes. The jury must not decide whether he acted with criminal intent. The 18-year-old wasted his understanding and soft approach when he was under police protection in a hotel. Even without his laptop, he pulled off his biggest scam to date.
Even though his laptop was confiscated and he was trapped in a hotel room, he managed to hack into Rockstar Games' systems. He stole a total of 90 clips from GTA VI, the game fans have been waiting for years. He also broke down Slack's internal communication and threatened to publish it: “If Rockstar doesn't contact me on Telegram within 24 hours, I will start publishing the source code.”
His skills are evident in the way he managed this hacker attack: with a cell phone, an Amazon Fire Stick and the hotel television.
Highly motivated to attack companies again
The deadline expired and he made good on his threat. He posted the clips and source code on a forum under the name TeaPotUberHacker. After this became known, his bail was revoked and he was detained in jail pending trial.
After a seven-week trial, he and a 17-year-old colleague were convicted in August of serious computer misuse, extortion and fraud against BT Group Plc's EE network and Nvidia was found guilty. Kurtaj was also found guilty of conspiring to invest in Uber Technologies Inc., financial firm Revolut Ltd. and hacking Rockstar Games.
Judge Patricia Lees ruled that Kurtaj should be kept in a secure hospital until a mental health court rules that he will be able to walk again in the future. Lees noted that Kurtaj is still fixated on hacking and is likely to reoffend. During the trial it was also learned that the 18-year-old had provoked fights in prison and destroyed other people's property in several dozen cases. After all, he admitted to doctors that he couldn't wait to return to activity. Kurtaj still poses “a high risk of causing serious harm to the public by gaining unfettered access to computers”, Lees told Guildford Crown Court on Thursday. There is also a risk he could be targeted by online hackers and be tempted to commit further crimes .
His defense lawyers argued that the success of the game's trailer suggested that Kurtaj's hack did not cause serious harm to the game's developer, and asked that this be taken into account at sentencing. Earlier this month, the GTA 6 trailer was released and garnered 128 million views on YouTube in just 4 days. The court did not want to accept this argument, as the BBC reports: Lapsus$ harms real companies and people. Rockstar Games says it spent $5 million recovering from the attack.