> Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.<p>That's quite a feat.<p>> Rockstar Games alone told the court that the hack cost it $5m to recover from plus thousands of hours of staff time.<p>Either the kid is a genius or Rockstar really don't value their security much. Or maybe a bit of both?
Absolutely monumental waste of talent. Reminds me of how I got expelled from high school for "hacking" into their terrible infrastructure (without causing any damage whatsoever, other than to their pride). They threw the book at me. Threatened felonies. Were going on and on about how I will never vote, never be able to work as a postal worker etc.<p>Get this kid into the right environment and he would probably be able to do great things.
Life in prison for up to $10m in damages? At first I thought the number must be off by a factor of 10. I couldn’t help but see Dr Evil for a moment.<p>These are at best property crimes, and while the sums are non trivial, sentencing children to indefinite imprisonment for a nonviolent crime against a megacorp is unconscionable.
BBC's actual headline: "Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order"<p>The editorialized reframing of the headline is a bit subtle but still incredibly dishonest. An <i>indefinite</i> psychiatric order is simply not the same as a life sentence.
>Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his acute autism<p>The kid was able to join an international cybergang and hack into a multi-billion dollar corporation. That doesn't sound like somebody who's incapable of standing trial. The article also said that he was violent in custody, but it doesn't mention any form of violence when he was out on the streets. I'm not a lawyer (much less a British one), but an indefinite hospital order is way too severe for a non-violent crime. Hopefully he gets a retrial.
> 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.<p>>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.<p>This sounds too fantastical to be true.<p>This guy is obviously brilliant, disappointing that he squandered his opportunities.
It concluded that Lapsus$ "made clear just how easy it was for its members (juveniles, in some instances) to infiltrate well-defended organisations".<p>To me, that sounds more like they were not well-defended ...
I would say he's not in trouble for gaining access to systems, it's for extortion:<p>> He worked with Kurtaj and other members of Lapsus$ to hack tech giant Nvidia and phone company BT/EE and steal data before demanding a four million dollar ransom, which was not paid.
I'd really like to hear more about the type of exploits here. Like, what level- Are we saying this kid is so brilliant he is writing zero-days for getting into corporate networks or if this a case of a guy in a good script-kiddie type group running phishing deals where they fire off 100000 emails a day and wait for someone to give up their logic credentials.<p>Because if it is the former it's really hard for me to understand how that is still even possible in this day and age. Autism, brilliance, or whatever... a 17 year old breaking into systems like they are as exploitable as early 90's systems sounds just insane to me.
He is a danger to crappy security and those that fear free thinkers like him.<p>There ought to be laws against locking people like him up.<p>Rockstar said it cost them thousands of hours to recover...they could have asked him, and it might have cost them orders of magnitude less.<p>Rockstar has hired the wrong people, lol.
>>As well as hacking offences the boy was sentenced for what the judge described as "unpleasant and frightening pattern of stalking and harassment" of two young women.<p>Bunch of people on here are defending him, please justify this for me.
The amount of stereotyping of Autism here is horrible.<p>Perpetrating the trope of the "Idiot Savant" or "Helpless Amorality" undercuts the millions of neurodiverse people who haven't harassed, assaulted, or threatened people.
Relevant sections 23 (discharge of patients) and 41 (restriction of discharge from hospital) of the Mental Health Act of 1983<p><a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/20/section/41" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/20/section/41</a><p><a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/20/section/23" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/20/section/23</a><p>I'm curious about the success (discharge) rate in these cases. With only yearly clinician reports to Secretary of State, and all the hands involved, things appear grim. Hope I'm wrong.
Arion needs help, including care for his autism. What a painful, horrible way to live every day (effectively untreated autism). He's in this situation because he did not have proper help. What a nightmare for him.<p>Clearly he has some drive that he satisfies by hacking. Good care will help him identify that drive and direct it toward something healthy.<p>Where are his family? Has he been walking around with this illness, as a child, alone in the world? How heartbreaking. We've embraced contempt for humanity and human rights, and this is a result.
We should stop glamorizing criminal activities.<p>Even if someone's door is wide open, any self respecting individual wouldn't step in and steal. The urge is always there and is natural. But everything natural isn't the right thing to do.<p>Besides that, article has no technical hints as to why that happened. Rockstar level of IT environment is not that misconfigured I suppose or there are some inherent design flawa Internet protocol suite that can be exploited with a Firestick?
This would be a much better TV series script than that "The Good Doctor" crap. No offense to all the "The Good Doctor" fans. (We all have our own "crappy" stuff we like)<p>Society would improve if we could turn these high skilled individuals into productive law abiding citizens without having to go through A Clockwork Orange kind of "reeducation".
> He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger, Southwark crown court heard on Thursday.<p>For life, haha. Probably a few months at most.<p>> Many young people wish to explore how technology works and what vulnerabilities exist. This can include learning to code, interacting with like-minded individuals online and experimenting with tools.<p>Learning to code and experimenting is wayyyy beyond what topic OP is doing.<p>Personally I don't really care. Rockstar has a grip on it. I'm proud of this fellow for finding and exploiting holes. Yes, he should have gone through proper channels. But he is also just a kid and likely don't understand responsible disclosure.<p>The target person in this article should be educated and administered. They clearly have a lot of potential. Limiting them is not the way to go.
What bothers me about this isn't that he was committed to a "hospital" (read: jail for mentally ill people).<p>What bothers me is that the sentence is indefinite. The judge can give him a life sentence for what wouldn't normally justify a life sentence because he's calling it "medicine". The hospital commitment shouldn't be able to last longer than the sentence he would receive if he was neurotypical.
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Indefinite hospital stay order for hacking?<p>I had to read the article 3 or 4 times before I was able to understand that this was in the UK, not in a 3rd world dictatorship.
For anyone who skips the article and comes straight to the comments, this is not because of the hacking. This is because of (alleged) violence and expressed eagerness to return to cybercrime.<p>> <i>The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage.</i><p>> <i>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."</i><p>...<p>The details are absolutely wild too. I mean...<p>> <i>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.</i><p>Holy shit, dude. This is the sort of thing they make movies about. I wonder how much of it is true.
Stuff like this is why I’m glad Ken Kessey’s “one flew over the cuckoos nest” become popular and helped remove government mental hospitals from being a serious consideration in the USA.<p>This kid needs to be cultivated, not institutionalized.<p>(Edit: never mind, seems he IS a menace to society)
The sentence doesn't seem just.<p>Why not just restrict him from electronic devices like what happened to ZeroCool? Surely there are better solutions that putting him in a psych ward for life or until he is 'cured'.
> 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.<p>Damn! Approaching <a href="https://xkcd.com/378/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://xkcd.com/378/</a> ...
Did anyone here read TFA?<p>He was apparently shown to be a member of a cyber "gang", and expressed zero remorse. In this case, a judge basically has to do something.<p>> 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."<p>The guy was already on bail for another hack:<p>> 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.<p>> He worked with Kurtaj and other members of Lapsus$ to hack tech giant Nvidia and phone company BT/EE and steal data before demanding a four million dollar ransom, which was not paid.<p>> They also stole directly from individuals through their cryptocurrency wallets.<p>So:<p>> He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.<p>Hospital b/c of his severe autism. Ostensibly, what has to be done is rehabilitation. If he can even lie convincingly, he'll be out tomorrow.
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Life in prison for non-violent crime clearly sounds like revenge and sour grapes. The big guys clearly don't appreciate having their insecurity being exposed this way (keep in mind none of these hacks required any significant technical skills), and too many people would lose face. <i>Something</i> had to be done, so here it is.<p>The disparity of this punishment compared to what is usually given out for similar crimes (in the vast majority nothing as it doesn't even get investigated) suggests there is definitely some "saving face" motivation behind this sentence.
Seems reasonable to me. Glad there aren't any comments yet saying "oh gosh it was just a video game company, those are a scourge anyway on family morals!"
(posted on other thread)<p>A no doubt gifted person who was probably put through torture (as they would experience it) in a prison, now locked away for life because they lashed out.<p>Big clap for all the big brains there who failed this guy.
There should be a length of time attached. Even in the US “life” means a limited amount of time that can be stacked over and over again, and we would totally call that excessive for these crimes or lack of remorse.<p>This is really foreign and sad what the UK is doing.
There is an expectation here that this person will react to being arrested and imprisoned with <i>patience</i>; yet patience is not expected from <i>literally anyone else involved</i>.<p>It's abundantly clear that he is not being punished for harming <i>people</i>. He is being punished for <i>not playing along</i>. "Refusing to play along" is one of the most well known symptoms of Autism. This person is being punished for neurodivergence. I'm not even remotely OK with that.