I don’t know if my friends still remember this article we published in September last year - "GTA6 leaks may lead to redoing?" ! Have these 9 years of waiting been in vain? 》. Arion Kurtaj, the instigator of the incident, was sentenced by the court to lifelong hospitalization unless doctors deemed him no longer a threat.

What’sup, this is basically equivalent to a life-long “jail”. . .

Because Arion, a young man who just turned 18 this year, suffers from a variety of mental illnesses including autism and ADHD, he will most likely have to stay in the hospital for the rest of his life, and his hacker career is basically over.

The reason why the court gave such a severe sentence was not only because Arion suffered from mental illness and was "unable to communicate", but more importantly because he still refused to repent while in custody and completed the network intrusion into Rockstar through a TV stick.

And after he was arrested, he still said something tough - "Don't let me out, or I will dare to do it again next time."

After searching Arion's information on the Internet, Shichao discovered that although this boy was young, he had done big jobs.

He started committing hacking crimes in 2019. In the past three years, he has attacked major international companies such as Nvidia, Samsung, Microsoft and Rockstar, causing losses of nearly 10 million US dollars.

However, the most interesting thing about his story is that he did not waste millions of dollars obtained through illegal means on luxury goods like most teenage hackers. Instead, he used the money to bribe employees of major technology companies and purchase vulnerabilities, and then used them to conduct larger-scale hacking attacks.

It can be seen that this kid has some plans for committing hacking crimes - or in other words, he is addicted to it.

So, today we will take a look at the "cheating" life of this young hacker.

Although Arion has cleared most of his early digital traces on the Internet, some YouTube bloggers have dug up some of his previous videos.

In 2016, Arion shared a video of himself riding an off-road motorcycle on YouTube. At that time, he was still a good boy who loved outdoor sports and abided by the law.

The reason why Arion came up with the idea of ​​​​hacking actually originated from a game-"Minecraft".

Some bloggers discovered that Arion liked to play "Minecraft" in 2017, and would gain an advantage by cheating when playing in PVP mode.

Arion’s three game IDs

Perhaps because of too many cheats, Arion slowly became interested in this method that can break the balance of the game.

He began to study various hacking methods, and in mid-2018, he focused on more sophisticated hacking methods.

According to reports from server administrators, Arion (ShadowArion4384 is his game ID) once exploited a vulnerability in the server to gain administrator rights and cause damage to the server.

Later, whether because he was tired of playing, had a conscience, or wanted to make money, Arion posted on Hypixel (a "Minecraft" small server), asking the server administrator to launch a bug bounty program to reward users who report vulnerabilities.

But his proposal was not approved because others felt that testing should be left to server administrators.

If we follow the plot of the current short drama, then the status of Arion who was rejected at that time should be:

"I'm going black!!!"

And indeed it is.

By December 2019, the gears of Arion’s destiny began to turn.

He was almost 15 years old at the time. He was no longer satisfied with cheating in "Minecraft" and began to try to carry out website attacks and embarked on the path of hacker crime.

Arion and his accomplices destroyed the NASA official website and left his name on it.

This kind of behavior is actually equivalent to "XXX came here", just to brag in the hacker community——

“Dude hacked NASA’s official website! ”

By 2021, Arion began to use hacking methods to make money. He cooperated with another hacker named Everlynn and established a new organization-Infinity Recursion.

This organization provided a search warrant/subpoena service at the time, which could not only find other people's real names, addresses, phone numbers and billing information, but even chat messages on some software, and the price was only $250.

What’s even more surprising is that the way they implemented it was by exploiting loopholes in relevant US departments.

According to blogger @Crumb, Arion’s organization used compromised electronic law enforcement emails to send false information to the company to retrieve the user information it wanted to find.

During the Infinity Recursion period, Arion should have made his first pot of gold, so he wanted to use this money to fund some larger and more destructive hacking operations.

But for some reason, he parted ways with some of his previous team members.

After InfinityRecursion disbanded, he and the remaining members formed a new team at the end of 2021, which later became the infamous Lapsuss.

Perhaps because the previous hacking operations did not receive much attention from the media, he was very eager to gain attention during the Lapsuss period, his style was more high-profile, and the things he did were more outrageous.

Lapsuss focuses on cyberattacks on enterprises.

According to a report by network security company Intrinsec, in January and February of 2022 alone, Lapsuss hacked six companies, including Portugal's largest media group IMPRESA, British telecommunications group Vodafone, and the well-known Nvidia, etc.

One of the most sensational events in the media is probably the NVIDIA data leak.

On February 25, 2022, Lapsuss hacked into Nvidia's intranet and claimed to have stolen nearly 1 TB of data in order to blackmail Nvidia - if the ransom was not paid, the data would be made public.

But the technology giant Nvidia couldn't stand this anger, so it hacked into Lapsuss' computer and deleted the relevant data.

Because of this, Lapsuss posted the data backup online, which included the highly confidential NVIDIA graphics card driver and mining lock computing power software source code.

So everyone understands why not long after, a mining platform announced on the Internet that it had unlocked the computing power of the LHR graphics card.

Perhaps in the case of NVIDIA, Arion's team has tasted the sweetness of traffic.

Their next targets are the more popular industry giants, and major manufacturers such as Ubisoft, Samsung, Microsoft, and LG are all spared.

The most typical cases are Samsung and Microsoft. The former had his "underpants" stripped, while the latter was invaded because the reason was too abstract.

Let’s talk about Samsung first.

On March 4, 2022, Lapsuss announced that he had 190G of Samsung confidential documents in his possession.

Judging from the information they released, it includes the algorithm for the biometric unlocking operation, the source code of Samsung's activation server, the technical code (API and services) used to authorize and verify Samsung accounts, the bootloader source code of recent Samsung devices, etc.

These codes can be said to be secrets among secrets and are highly related to mobile phone security. They are equivalent to stripping away Samsung’s “underpants”.

What’s even more embarrassing is that this matter also involves Qualcomm’s code.

Gao Tong: If people sit at home, disaster will come from the sky. . .

Let’s talk about Microsoft.

On March 22, 2022, Lapsuss hacked into Microsoft's intranet and not only obtained the source code of Microsoft servers, but also escaped unscathed.

The reason why they are able to do this is not because of how strong their coding ability is, but because they know how to use "money ability".

According to Microsoft's own investigation, the reason the team was able to invade the corporate intranet was because an insider provided help. . .

Judging from the screenshots leaked online, Lapuss has recruited internal employees of major companies on his channel, trying to obtain the login credentials and intranet access rights of major companies with a weekly remuneration of US$20,000.

emmm. . . When hackers study the weaknesses of human nature, major manufacturers are really sweating.

On March 24, after invading Microsoft, the London police arrested seven members of the team, including Arion, because previous investigation reports from major manufacturers were enough to confirm the organization's criminal behavior.

However, because Arion had just turned 17 at the time and the trial period for such serious violations was long, he was able to be released on bail the day after he was arrested and jailed.

Of course, the court also attached a condition to his bail, which is to stay away from the Internet.

Therefore, he must live in a court-appointed hotel and be supervised.

Just when everyone thought he should stop, Arion began to return to his old business in early September 2022.

One night, he went to the hotel next door and bought an Amazon FireStick that he could use to watch TV shows and movies.

After plugging the TV stick into the TV and pairing the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, Arion set up a "temporary computer" in the room.

Using this gadget, he was able to remotely access a virtual private server for hacking.

Then. . . He did a big job that shocked gamers around the world - the trailer of GTA6 was leaked.

According to the blogger, Arion hacked an internal employee's Slack account, gained control of the contractor's account in the company channel, and then used the contractor's login details to gain access to channels related to game development, thereby finding documents related to GTA6.

After doing this last big thing, Arion was arrested again by the British police and was finally sentenced to indefinite hospital care by the court.

Looking back at the things Arion did, maybe it’s like what this netizen said – he shouldn’t have become a “black hat” in the first place.

I think the reason that led Arion to the point of no return is more or less related to his special encounter.

According to media reports, as a teenager, due to mental illness, Arion dropped out of regular school and transferred to a special education school, where he was beaten by staff.

Moreover, his parents have separated and rarely take the initiative to care about Arion.

Perhaps because of these experiences, he was extremely eager for attention during his subsequent hacking activities.

Eh ~ I think if Arion can use his ability on the right path, maybe his life will be brighter.