The teen allegedly behind the GTA 6 leak was already on bail for a different crime when he hacked Rockstar Games.
Someone hacking the makers of Grand Theft Auto and making off with mountains of unfinished footage and screenshots of GTA 6 sounds like something that would happen in the game itself, not real life. But it did happen and now the main culprits are facing some very serious consequences.
At the time, all that was really known was that a British teenager was responsible, but more concrete info has since come out thanks to the alleged culprit’s recent court trial.
18-year-old Arion Kurtaj, alongside an unnamed 17-year-old, have been convicted of the crime, which it turns out involved a Travelodge hotel room and an Amazon Fire Stick.
According to a BBC report, it’s said that Kurtaj had the Fire Stick plugged into his hotel TV, which allowed him to connect to cloud services through his newly bought smartphone.
He proceeded to hack Rockstar, announced himself as ‘an attacker’ to employees through the company’s Slack page, and then threatened to leak the source code if Rockstar didn’t contact him via Telegram in the next 24 hours.
What makes the situation even more bizarre is that Kurtaj was only in that hotel because he was on bail. Kurtaj, alongside the unnamed 17-year-old, were part of the hacker group Lapsus$ and had already been arrested for their alleged involvement in a similar hacking incident against Nvidia.
Rival hackers then doxed Kurtaj and his family’s contact details, prompting him to be moved to a hotel based in Bicester for his safety. However, his bail conditions included a ban from using the Internet, which he obviously ignored.
As both Kurtaj and his co-conspirator are autistic, they’ve been deemed unfit to stand trial. This also means the jurors had to determine whether or not they committed the alleged acts, and not if they did so with criminal intent.
Both have been convicted, though, and are scheduled to be sentenced at a later date. Currently, Kurtaj remains in custody while the 17-year-old is on bail.
The final irony of the whole case is that despite getting away with a significant amount of prototype footage, none of it was particularly revealing and nothing of significance was learnt from the leak that hadn’t already been rumoured through normal sources.
Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.
Follow Metro Gaming on Twitter and email us at [email protected]
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
Sign up to all the exclusive gaming content, latest releases before they’re seen on the site.
Source: Read Full Article