It took less than six days, but the Rockstar Games hacker has been arrested. Earlier this week a cybersecurity incident lead to a hacker leaking torrents of information on Grand Theft Auto VI. This highly anticipated installment to the franchise made headlines nearly two months ago when it was announced that the player would control two protagonists, one of which is female.
Loading screen image showing male and female.
Rockstar tends to keep a tight lid on things and release announcements slowly and steadily. There is little need for extensive market schemes for a sequel to the single highest-grossing piece of entertainment media in history. In short: the studio likes to control the narrative pace and have the means to do so.
One of the Largest Leaks in Gaming History
At least, they did. But, on Sunday, September 18 a massive leak hit GTAForums. A user with the handle teapotuberhacker uploaded 90 videos of pre-alpha footage. The videos appear to spoil nothing of the story, city, and other major aspects of the game. They do, however, show off early builds of characters, some environments, and action.
A Message from Rockstar Games pic.twitter.com/T4Wztu8RW8
— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) September 19, 2022
In their post, the leaker also posted about having obtained source codes for both Grand Theft Auto V and VI. They were found on Telegram trying to sell the source code for GTA V.
Hacker’s Telegram post looking to sell GTA V source code.
In a strange turn of events teapotuberhacker, as their name may suggest, was also linked to a hack suffered by the ride-share service Uber. In this cybersecurity instance, the perpetrator sent images to the company showing sensitive information and threatened to release customer data. Luckily, no customer data appears to have been accessed.
Rockstar Hacker Arrested
These two instances raised enough attention to warrant the interest of national security teams in both the United States and Britain. Earlier today the City of London Police, in conjunction with the UK’s National Cyber Crimes Unit and the FBI, arrested a 17-year-old. No further information has been released as of yet.
UPDATE: @CityPolice confirm 17-year-old arrested over hacking incident; source says the crime is related to intrusion on Rockstar Games and possibly Uber Technologies. https://t.co/lLHX2cpGfA $UBER
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) September 23, 2022
There is speculation that the Oxfordshire teen has connections to Lapsus$. This is a group of hackers responsible for targeting companies such as Microsoft and T-Mobile. Eight teenagers have been arrested in Britain with association to this group.
