A week after anonymous hackers breached both Uber and Rockstar Games’ network servers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice are investigating a British teenager as the prime suspect.
According to Forbes, the alleged hacker is only 16 years old and possibly the leader of Lapsus$, a crime group in the United Kingdom. On Sunday (Sept. 18), a total of 90 video clips of the in-development version of the Grand Theft Auto VI video game were shared by uploader teapotuberhacker on the GTAForums website.
The publication reports that the alleged hacker, possibly the uploader, was arrested in March by the City of London Police for activities involving the Lapsus$ group. In a BBC report, the 16-year-old, who could not be named for legal reasons, reportedly earned $14 million from his crimes. In both cases, the young hacker’s group was behind his identity reveal.
On Monday (Sept. 19), Uber released a statement to its customers detailing the breach allegedly caused by Lapsus$. “An Uber EXT contractor had their account compromised by an attacker. It is likely that the attacker purchased the contractor’s Uber corporate password on the dark web after the contractor’s personal device had been infected with malware, exposing those credentials,” the statement reads.
It continued, “From there, the attacker accessed several other employee accounts, which ultimately gave the attacker elevated permissions to a number of tools, including G-Suite and Slack. The attacker then posted a message to a company-wide Slack channel, which many of you saw, and reconfigured Uber’s OpenDNS to display a graphic image to employees on some internal sites.” The company realized its servers were compromised last Thursday (Sept. 15), forcing it to take several internal communications and engineering systems offline while investigating the attack.
Rockstar Games also issued a statement via Twitter, describing the breach as “an intrusion by a third party.” “We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our game shared with you all in this way. We will update everyone again soon and, of course, will properly introduce you to this next game when it is ready,” the statement concludes.
As of yet, no arrests have been made in relation to the Uber or Rockstar Games hackings.
You can see Rockstar Games’ full statement down below: