One of the hackers who leaked Grand Theft Auto 6 footage onto the Internet in 2022 accessed Rockstar Games‘ servers with an Amazon Fire Stick in a hotel room.
On August 23, the court found that 18-year-old Arion Kurtaj carried out the cyber attack on the company as well as BT, EE, Nvidia, Revolut and Uber. The BBC‘s report stated that Kurtaj is a member of Lapsus$, an international collective of hackers who allegedly operate in the United Kingdom and Brazil.
Psychiatrists determined that Kurtaj was unfit to stand trial as he has autism. Therefore, the jury in Southwark Crown Court was asked to conclude whether or not he was the individual behind the attacks rather than deciding if he did it with criminal intent.
Jurors heard that Kurtaj was staying in a Travelodge in Bicester, Oxfordshire, when the City Of London Police searched his hotel room. The officers discovered an Amazon Fire Stick attached to his TV which allowed him access to cloud computing services with a new smart phone, keyboard and mouse.
As well as being in “flagrant disregard for his bail conditions”, Kurtaj took to Rockstar Games’ Slack channels to broadcast all employees, “I am not a Rockstar employee, I am an attacker.”
While footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 started to show up online under the username TeaPotUberHacker posting to a fan forum, the man claimed that he had the entire source code for the game in his possession.
“If Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code,” he threatened. At the time of writing, Kurtaj has been remanded in custody and the other teenager that assisted him is on bail.
Both of the hackers will be sentenced by Her Honour Judge Lees at a later date.
In other gaming news, Epic Games offered developers 100 per cent of revenue for total exclusivity during the first six months of their game’s launch.