As 2023 comes to an end, cybercrime has become a critical issue. Insomniac Games, the famed developer of Marvel’s Spider-Man and its sequel Spider-Man 2 became the latest victim of a lack recently. Nearly 1.6TB of information including developer builds of the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine, timeline of upcoming games, as well as personal data of employees were put online by hackers. While this hack was shocking, it isn’t the only one suffered by a major gaming developer in recent years. Just last year, Rockstar Games was hacked and 90 early development videos of GTA 6 were leaked online. Sometime later, it was concluded that a teen was behind the hack, and now he has been sentenced to life in hospital prison.
GTA 6 hack: What happened?
One of the biggest game leaks in recent years, the early gameplay footage leak of GTA 6 rocked Rockstar Games in September 2022. A hacker who goes by “teapotuberhacker” leaked 90 early development gameplay videos of the next GTA game online on the GTAForums platform. Although Take-Two Interactive, the publisher behind GTA games, immediately issued a takedown of the illegally obtained videos, they had already been reposted millions of times across social media.
The credibility of the videos was confirmed early by Bloomberg Reporter Jason Schreier through Rockstar sources. Now, Rockstar Games have also confirmed that it was indeed early development gameplay footage of GTA 6. The game developer tweeted that the hacker illegally obtained data from Rockstar’s servers which “included “early development footage” of the next Grand Theft Auto game.
Later, it was concluded that hacker group LAPSUS$ was behind the attack, with Arion Kurtaj from Oxford being the “teapotuberhacker” on GTAForums who released the videos.
Prison sentence
In August, a jury concluded that Kurtaj was indeed behind the hacks that hit Rockstar Games. Kurtaj, 18, who is autistic, has now been sentenced to life in hospital prison by a UK judge who deemed that the hacker posed a threat to the public. As per the court, Kurtaj “had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage”, the BBC reported.
The hacker also underwent a mental health evaluation which revealed that he “continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible”.
