The story is more interesting than the title suggests! This guy was arrested for hacking two telecom companies, got released under investigation, then immediately hacked Nvidia before being put under house arrest. After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.
All in all, he’s believed to have stolen $14 million+. By the way… he’s 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education school.
After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.
Fuckin’ bravo. I mean, don’t do that, but on a purely technical level - nice.
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There’s no ethical use of ransomware.
deploying Godwin’s Law
Oh yeah? What about ransomware-ing NAZI’s and Hitler?
Is that immoral?
Probably, since you’d have time travel, but not just shoot the bastards.
He didn’t just steal content. He then tried to blackmail the company to not release the content he stole.
Also, while you might be able to justify piracy of a released product in various ways (the common argument is that the would be pirate wouldn’t have paid for the product anyway and digital goods don’t have any cost to the developer from pirating them). But when the product hasn’t been released yet, then it has a much bigger cost because the pirated copy is the only option available and thus it can eat into actual sales. The inability to go through with their planned launch (something big publishers will spend millions hyping) and the release of an unfinished product can absolutely have financial damages. It’s hard to recover from a bad launch.
And that’s without getting into the fact that hackers like this don’t usually stop at just leaking video games or the likes. They’ll also often steal people’s personal information. It’s a lot easier to see the moral issues when it’s your information being stolen.
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Well, between getting doxxed and annihilating any chance he had at getting a lenient sentencing, the more sensible decision would have probably been to sit on his hands and bide time for a couple months lol.
Given he’s autistic, that’s probably actually impossible for him to do.
Well in that case I guess he’s been cursed by fate in an uncaring world 🤷
But at least we can punish him. Eh?
That’ll teach him for being congenitally neurodivergent.
Da fuck…
Waiting for the movie btw 🍿.
Jesus Christ, this man is a criminal Tony Starks
Was reading Hackaday’s source article on BBC and came across this:
That did not deter the duo who continued hacking with Lapsus$ and successfully breached Nvidia, a Silicon Valley tech giant that makes chips for artificial intelligence chatbots, in February 2022.
That’s a funny as fuck way of classifying Nvidia.
