The legal system (court) has discovered an 18-year-old teenager part of a cyber-crime group, and responsible for the impertinent cyber-attack against major tech organizations.
The teenager who goes by the name Arian Kurtaj, was a top member of the Lapsus$ group, that compromised organizations such as Nvidia, Rockstar Game, and Uber. This incident which occurred between the year 2021, and 2022, was a major shock in the cybersecurity Industry, according to CISA reports.
History about the Lapsus$ Gang:
The key member of Lapsus$ gang Kurtaj who is 18-years of age, is said to be residing in oxford. Diagnosed with autism, the psychiatric department are of the opinion of him not being fit to present himself on trial, and was not able to appear in court.
The jury were questioned to ascertain if he actually conducted the act or not; and not concerned if the motivation behind the attack was of criminal intent.
Another accomplice (17-years old), whose name was withheld due to age, was said to be autistic as well, and convicted due to his involvement with the gang (Lapsus$), and its activities.
The groups which are said to be from both the United Kingdom and Brazil, was described by the court as “Digital Bandits.”
The gang groups which consist of teenagers utilize professional con-man gimmicks, and computer devices to break into high profiled organizations such as Microsoft, The technology giant Rockstar, and Digital Banking group Revolut.
The gang then resort in celebrating their crime success publicly, by posting and taunting their victims on the social network app called telegram, both in English language, and Portuguese. The court trial, held for over seven weeks in Southwark Crown Court in London.
How the Cybercrime was conducted:
The cybercrime by the threat group was conducted in various stages, in the month of July, 2021 the 17-year-old unnamed teenager and Kurtaj, met online, and that is when their syndicate commenced.
Kurtaj, assisted the group (Lapsus$) groups in gaining illegitimate access to servers belonging to telecoms company such as BT and EE, and exfiltrated sensitive data files belonging to the organization. The group subsequently sent a ransom message demanding the sum of £3.1 million (British pounds), on August 1st 2021.
The telecom organization declined the demands, and the group took a further step on the next stage of attack; utilizing the stolen sim details, from five victims, and made out with over £100,000 worth of cryptocurrency from their crypto-wallets.
The group moved on to their next target which was Nvidia on February 2022. A successful attempt gave the group leverage and sensitive data were successfully stolen and subsequently leaked. Nvidia was contacted by the group to make a ransom payment or they would continue releasing the stolen data to the internet.
Information on how they used telegram in hiring a mole, to call the Nvidia staff help desk and acting to be an employee of the organization, in order to obtain login details of the organization, were shown to the Jury.
Further tricks the group applied include spamming Nvidia employees’ phone, late in the night requesting access approval, until the staff gave in. The duo was re-arrested on March 31st 2022.
Kurtaj, was then moved into Travelodge Hotel in Bicester, with a strict bail condition, and ban from using the internet. The prodigy still refused to give in, and continued with his hacking.
In a raid search by the City of London police, it was discovered that Kurtaj, was in possession of an Amazon Fire Stick, in his hotel room, that lets him connect to cloud computing services.
Other organization he assisted the threat group in hacking includes Uber, Revolut, and Rockstar Games.
In a message he posted on compromising Rockstar, through the slack messaging service to all employees of the organization he said: “I am not a Rockstar employee, I am an attacker.”
The teen also informed the organization, that all data for the Grand Theft Auto 6, has been downloaded by him, and if the Rockstar company does not contact him, within a space of 24-hrs, he did be releasing the source code to the public.
It is also noted, that the unfinished gameplay for the new game was published on a fan forum under the name tag TeaPotUberHacker.
Kurtaj has been re-arrested and will remain detained until his court appearance for his trial.
Article credit: BBC
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