GTA 6 Hacker Found To Be Teen With Amazon Fire Stick In Small Town Hotel Room
International cybercrime, as portrayed by the movies and mass media, is a high-stakes game of shadowy government agencies and state-sponsored hacking groups. Hollywood casting will wheel out a char…
British teen from the Lapsus$ gang hacks GTA 6 details in a small town hotel room using an Amazon Fire Stick. Despite compromising British telcos, he's exposed, caught by authorities, and leaks GTA 6 footage after using the Fire Stick to access cloud services and breach organizations. The tale highlights untapped talent and lack of support in his education system.
Good tldr
The story is more interesting than the title suggests! This guy was arrested for hacking two telecom companies, got released under investigation, then immediately hacked Nvidia before being put under house arrest. After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.
All in all, he's believed to have stolen $14 million+. By the way... he's 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education school.
Prior to reading your comment, I considered myself to be a skilled software developer.
It always warms my heart when a single person is able to outsmart large multi-million/billion dollar tech companies like Nvidia and Rockstar. Really shows how piss poor these companies security can be.
I would definitely look to hire that kid with a high wage just to make sure he doesn't hacke me again, if I were one of the companies he hacked into. Companies should really think about trying to hire these hackers because then the threats against them might go down ever so slightly.
I would definitely look to hire that kid with a high wage just to make sure he doesn’t hacke me again, if I were one of the companies he hacked into. Companies should really think about trying to hire these hackers because then the threats against them might go down ever so slightly.
I understand your thought, but some people just want to watch the world burn and you definitely don't want to bring that sort inside.
This guy seems to be driven, capable and lacking the common sense to know when to stop.
Its kind of inevitable, you know that meme about the overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists? Well the same is true for secure working practices and the dumbest/laziest employees. Any system too secure will also be enough of a pain in the ass that some people will start doing stupid shit that nullifies that security.
Companies should really think about trying to hire these hackers because then the threats against them might go down ever so slightly
some companies do.
I want this guy's energy. Nothing could stop him!
If you’re autistic, the outside world is horrifying to you and technology is the only thing you care about, so that’s what you’ll eat, drink and breathe all the time. It’s not really about the energy, it’s about the environment and your ability or inability to tolerate certain aspects of it.
Fucking legend
This guy was arrested for hacking two telecom companies, got released under investigation, then immediately hacked Nvidia before being put under house arrest. After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.
All in all, he’s believed to have stolen $14 million+. By the way… he’s 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education schoo
wild
This has to be a movie plot..
Seems like a person I like and would love to smoke a joint with, lol
The story is more interesting than the title suggests! This guy was arrested for hacking two telecom companies, got released under investigation, then immediately hacked Nvidia before being put under house arrest. After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.
All in all, he’s believed to have stolen $14 million+. By the way… he’s 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education school.
Heh Kid's handle better be dr0id or some shit: "give me an android terminal and I'll hack the world"
Uhhhh so when’s that movie coming out? I’d watch the fuck outta that!
All in all, he’s believed to have stolen $14 million+. By the way… he’s 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education school.
that kid's my hero
This is a bit of a crossover ep between the movie Hackers and the DS9 ep where Julian basically got introduced to a group of obviously coded autistic anarchists.
I feel guilty now because I bought a new monitor because my old screen space wasn't cutting it.
He bought the fire stick from the shop right next to the hotel... how the heck did he get Linux on it? Or are they selling those bootleg fire sticks?
He used a rented server to hack Rockstar, the FireStick was merely a means to connect to it.
Was reading Hackaday's source article on BBC and came across this:
That did not deter the duo who continued hacking with Lapsus$ and successfully breached Nvidia, a Silicon Valley tech giant that makes chips for artificial intelligence chatbots, in February 2022.
That's a funny as fuck way of classifying Nvidia.
Sounds like something written by AI, ironically. That's the most talked about thing for the moment, so that's what it picks up on. It doesn't care if it's correct.
But it is correct now. Nvidia is making way more AI chips cards whatever then it is GPUs.
It's not inaccurate though. They do make a AI chips.
They probably make more than than they do GPUs now. Which is depressing.
Gaming GPUs are now only a small part of their revenue.
Nvidia now cares more about AI than gamers, and people now know more about them because the AI chips they make, I have an Nvidia GPU, but I'm looking to get an AMD GPU (Also and intel ARC will also be fine because I upgrade my power supply), I dislike Nvidia a lot now.
I like the Arc series as a concept, because they're the only value-driven option. Nvidia is just about pumping power and AMD is about trying cool gimmicks like dual clocks and chiplets.
Eventually I hope that the Arc series contributes to an Intel chiplet series similar to the APUs available on handhelds.
wait isnt the firestick like a chromecast? how does one even hack with that???
Its just android skinned
Its a computer. That's all a hacker needs.
Firestick's are just re-skinned android, which itself is a linux distro very basically. It's not extremely difficult to get a working terminal that can install languages and packages like a normal linux distro. I think they even have OOTB support for keyboards/mice. That said, it's a lot funnier to picture them sitting there with the remote like it's super smash.
You can connect bluetooth devices to it and run a browser, command prompt, etc. I'm thinking he used that type of stuff through the firestick.
Even supports keyboard and mouse. Itd be annoying as hell to use, but be usable
(termux would give you like a full linux experience even)
It is nothing more than an internet connected terminal. Once you're logged in to a server, the firestick is only sending/receiving small chunks of text.
Technically impressive but also fuck this kid for all his counts of spreading ransomware and stealing user data to hack their accounts too.
power to the people right on
Has anyone seen where to check the footage out?? Looks like it's all been DMCA'd from the majority of the web... I'm not a huge GTA Stan but I kinda wanna see what got leaked!
IIRC it looked a lot like GTA V with some debugging info added. Most changes seem to be under-the-hood.
It did look very similar to GTA V, but it's also worth noting that pretty much all of the footage was from very early production. It's likely that they were using less detailed character/world models for testing purposes. I imagine the game will look pretty damn good and modern once the proper lighting and textures are applied.
Ultimately I don't remember anything incredibly interesting from the videos I saw outside of a couple of story beats revolving around the new main characters. It seemed like most of the videos were pretty much testing certain console and systems at non-specified points in game.
It isn't very interesting because it's just a bunch of internal videos that people sent to each other for various reasons. And it's all out of context because the context would have been provided in an email but we don't ever see.
Sometimes I'm not sure what some of the footage is trying to demonstrate.
Also most of the animation stuff isn't complete yet and the AI, at least in the videos I saw was brain dead. So it's not really representative of the final product and it doesn't really look like anything.
Never underestimate a kid with free time
Wonderful
The moment of excitement in one’s hometown and the sensationalist reporting aside, we can’t help feeling sad that a teen with that level of talent evidently wasn’t given the support and encouragement by Oxfordshire’s education system necessary to put it to better use.
What a weird conclusion for the author to draw
How so? Someone needs to hire this kid, he sounds like he has a lot of potential.
I don't know enough about this kid from the article to argue that he's not highly skilled.
It's still a weird tangent though and reductive to blame the school system, when he doesn't even present any evidence that this was caused by some failing of the schools. Maybe you've been following this and can provide more context, but this context wasn't presented in the article.
Technically he's an adult. Still has a childlike underdeveloped prefrontal cortex mind you. Not very smart.
Dunno why you're getting so many downvotes... Even if someone disagrees, it's a pretty reasonable thing to say.
Plus IMO it is kind of a non sequitur to say "if only the schools were better," as though his motivations could have been satisfied with better homework assignments, lol.