Two British Teens and Their Audacious Hack of Nvidia, Grand Theft Auto and Uber

gadgets.ndtv.com:

At 9 pm on September 22 last year, a group of City of London police officers waited outside room M15 at the Travelodge Bicester, a one-star budget hotel in Oxfordshire, England, for the right moment to bust in. On the other side of the door was someone they believed to be behind two serious data hacks: one on Uber Technologies and the other an unprecedented leak of code for Rockstar Games's unreleased Grand Theft Auto sequel.

A complicated tracing and surveillance operation had helped the cops zero in on a user of the messaging platform Telegram named @lilyhowarth. Behind the door, however, was not Lily Howarth, but 17-year-old Arion Kurtaj — already on bail for a daring, large hack against chip maker Nvidia and an intrusion at the UK phone group BT Group. A member of a shadowy international bunch of loosely connected online extortionists who called themselves Lapsus$, Kurtaj had been lodged in the room by the police for his own safety after being outed by the hacker community. Lily Howarth was just another moniker he hid behind for his hacking activities, the officers discovered.

Now 18, Kurtaj was at the center of a seven-week criminal trial in London alongside a 17-year-old male co-defendant who can't be named because he's a minor. The two, who met online, faced a 12-count indictment including blackmail, fraud, and hacking charges. Kurtaj, who was solely responsible for half the charges, was found unfit to stand trial by a judge before it began because of his complex autistic-spectrum disorder — which means he can't be found to have had “criminal intent,” and may be given a community order or sent to a psychiatric-care facility rather than a jail after a jury this week found him liable for all the charges.

Defense