An 18-year-old hacker who leaked clips of a forthcoming Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.
Arion Kurtaj from Oxford, who has autism, was a key member of international gang Lapsus$.
The gang's attacks on tech giants including Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar Games cost the firms nearly $10m.
The judge said Kurtaj's skills and desire to commit cyber crime meant he remained a high risk to the public.
He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.
The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage.
Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his acute autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts - not if he did so with criminal intent.
A mental health assessment used as part of the sentencing hearing said he "continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible. He is highly motivated."
The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.
Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.
Kurtaj stole 90 clips of the unreleased and hugely anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.
He broke into the company's internal Slack messaging system to declare "if Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code".
He then posted the clips and source code on a forum under the username TeaPotUberHacker.
He was re-arrested and detained until his trial.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Even if the source code was released it would only be for an alpha build + proprietary tooling makes it near impossible to reverse engineer and compile GTA6 from source. Still bold as fuck though.
We will accept the child company of a multi-billion dollar corporation at their word and not question it at all.
It costs them literally nothing. It’s not like he wiped out their work.
No you don't understand, he stole all of it and the source code from that alpha build was worth 25 trillion dollars; smol bean Rockstar Games just wants a fraction of that back
Lol what did they fix for $5 million? Added 24/7 mods to the slack channels? Scolded the receptionist for giving a stranger credentials?