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Arion Kurtaj is currently facing trial in the UK over a 2022 hacking spree that caused millions of dollars of damage.
Kurtaj, who is now 18, is accused of illegally accessing the details of about 5,000 customers of global neobank Revolut in September 2022. He is alleged to have targeted Uber in a hack that cost the company US$3 million in damages, and then a few days later, he was able to get into the development environment of Rockstar Games’ upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI.
Kurtaj is also alleged to have blackmailed the developer, threatening to release the game’s source code, making the threat via the company’s in-house Slack and sending it to all of Rockstar’s employees.
In 2021, Kurtaj and another 17-year-old hacker from Lapsus$, are reported to have blackmailed BT Group — the UK’s biggest broadband operator — and mobile telco EE. The pair are alleged to have demanded a US$4 million ransom. Then in February 2022, the two youths targeted video card maker Nvidia, demanding another ransom. Failure to pay would lead to the leaking of stolen data.
Kurtaj has been charged with 12 offences and is currently facing trial over three charges under the Computer Misuse Act, two of fraud, and two blackmail charges. Kurtaj is denying he was responsible for the Nvidia and BT hacks, Reuters reports.
Though still facing court, Kurtaj has been found to be unfit to face trial. The jury in this case is merely to establish guilt or innocence in the matter.
The Lapsus$ group was responsible for a string of high-profile hacks in 2022. The group leaked around 190GB of Samsung data and attempted to hack into Cisco’s networks as well.
According to a Cisco blog post at the time, the company had “not identified any evidence suggesting that the attacker gained access to critical internal systems, such as those related to product development, code signing, etc”.
“The only successful data exfiltration that occurred during the attack included the contents of a Box folder that was associated with a compromised employee’s account. The data obtained by the adversary in this case was not sensitive,” Cisco added.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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