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.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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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.
The fact he used a FireTV stick to hack Rockstar is pretty impressive lol
I’m guessing those things run Linux. So you would just need a shell.
Though I’m guessing term of his house arrest didn’t allow him to have a keyboard. That part has me curious.
They run Android, so not really standard Linux, but yeah.
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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.
Counterpoint: he got caught. Whatever his offensive capabilities are, his security posture is evidently lacking. Recruiting a glass cannon like that might not work out if you're looking for help with security hardening.
Counter-counterpoint: he could work as a pentester, where his sole purpose is to just break into things.
Leave the policy making and actual hardening to someone else.
Then comes the issue of a rogue pentester selling his clients zerodays into black market for crypto. Don't know if the myth of being hired by government agencies is true.
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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.
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Jesus Christ, this man is a criminal Tony Starks
With the right education he could be the genius we need. Instead of prison he needs a decent mentor.
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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
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
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 $14 million+. By the way… he’s 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education school.
Heh Kid's handle better be dr0id or some shit: "give me an android terminal and I'll hack the world"
This is a bit of a crossover ep between the movie Hackers and the DS9 ep where Julian basically got introduced to a group of obviously coded autistic anarchists.
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Was reading Hackaday's source article on BBC and came across this:
That did not deter the duo who continued hacking with Lapsus$ 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.
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It's not inaccurate though. They do make a AI chips.
They probably make more than than they do GPUs now. Which is depressing.
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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.
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
Never underestimate a kid with free time
Wonderful
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