Two British Teens and Their Audacious Hack of Nvidia, Grand Theft Auto and Uber
An 18-year-old and his accomplice were part of a hacking group that cyber experts have called “unique for its effectiveness, speed, creativity, and boldness.” Its motivation: notoriety, money, and “lolz.”
At 9 p.m. on Sept. 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 Inc. and the other an unprecedented leak of code for Rockstar Games Inc.’s unreleased Grand Theft Auto sequel.
A complicated tracing and surveillance operation had helped the cops zero in on a user of 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, largescale hack against chip maker Nvidia Corp. and an intrusion at the UK phone group BT Group Plc. 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.