The 17-year-old arrested on suspicion of hacking and widely believed to be the person behind the shocking GTA 6 leaks last weekend has now been charged with the offences.
On Thursday, September 22, a UK teenager has been arrested on suspicion of hacking (opens in a new tab)with an emerging report linking the individual to the recent Rockstar Games breach that resulted in over 90 GTA 6 (opens in a new tab) videos and screens leaked online last weekend (opens in a new tab).
Although police have not publicly confirmed that the arrest is related to Rockstar’s security breach, the reporter Matthew Keys (opens in a new tab) tweeted that the 17-year-old – who as a minor is only known as AK – had been “arrested in Oxfordshire for the cyberattack on Rockstar and Uber”. He further confirmed that the same teenager was also arrested earlier this year for hacking Microsoft and Nvidia.
Keys reports that he was charged with “two computer offenses and two counts of breach of bail.” Rumors of the teenager being associated with the Lapsus$ hacking group are believed to be indeed true.
Teen charged with breach of bail and computer misuse offenses pic.twitter.com/8rQnsPblILSeptember 24, 2022
In an updated statement released over the weekend, the City of London Police (not to be confused with the Metropolitan Police) said:
“City of London Police arrested a 17-year-old in Oxfordshire on suspicion of hacking on Thursday September 22 in an investigation supported by the National Crime Agency’s National Cybercrime Unit. He has been charged in connection with this investigation and remains in custody.
“The teenager has been charged with two counts of breaching the conditions of his bail and two counts of misusing a computer.”
The teenager appeared in Highbury Corner Youth Court yesterday, September 24, but there has been no update on the outcome of that court appearance yet.
As for Rockstar itself? He officially acknowledged the leak on Monday (opens in a new tab).
“We recently experienced a network breach in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the upcoming Grand Theft Auto,” Twitter said. statement (opens in a new tab) of the studio bed.
“At this time, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services or any long-term effects on the development of our ongoing projects,” Rockstar said, seemingly addressing concerns that a leak of this size could force the studio to scrap and redo non-trivial parts of GTA 6. Rockstar further claims that “our work on the next Grand Theft Auto game will continue as planned.”
“The GTA 6 leak didn’t help anyone,” Austin wrote in his post, The GTA 6 leak was bad for everyone, but I’m glad the devs are celebrating the games break (opens in a new tab). “However, it has indirectly led to a ton of game developers talking candidly about how games are made, which is always a treat.
“Many developers have even shared their own in-progress builds to put the leak into perspective and fix the rash reviews of unfinished games and graphics. We rarely see the gaming industry rally around things like this, and there is even rarer that so many developers come together and explain how the sausage is made.
There is a lot of games like GTA (opens in a new tab)if you need to fill the long wait for the next entry in the series.
