It seems like a long time ago since the official announcement of Grand Theft Auto VI, but a major leak of the open-world action game last year caused quite a stir. The hacker responsible for this leak has now received a life sentence.
While the entire video game world is now only talking about the officially released trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI and perhaps the allegations of the Florida Joker, who wants millions in payments from Rockstar Games because of the alleged violation of his personal rights, something is being forgotten GTA 6 made big headlines last year too. At that time, early scenes from the action hopeful were leaked online on a large scale.
The 18-year-old hacker Arion Kurtaj was responsible for this leak – and he has now received a considerable punishment. So Kurtaj now has to go to a secure hospital and stay there as part of a lifelong imprisonment; this is reported by the British BBC.
Kurtaj had previously been found unfit to attend the trial. The reason: Kurtaj was diagnosed with “acute autism,” according to the BBC. This is one of the reasons why he should now spend the rest of his life in a suitable, safe hospital – at least until the responsible doctors determine that he can no longer pose a danger.
Arion Kurtaj was also found guilty on a total of 12 charges, including robbery and extortion. He is still believed to be a member of the international hacker group called Lapsus$, which has also claimed responsibility for other hacks. In addition to Rockstar Games, Uber and NVIDIA were also affected. According to the companies, the damage from the hacks is said to have totaled almost $10 million. Rockstar Games alone is said to have invested around $5 million to recover from the hack. In addition, there were thousands of hours of work by our own employees. Rockstar did not want to comment further on Kurtaj’s conviction.
After the NVIDIA hack, Kurtaj reportedly got into the Rockstar Games Slack channel. He used an Amazon FireTV stick, his hotel TV and a cell phone. There he was able to download and ultimately publish more than 90 video clips; Scenes from GTA 6 that were in development at the time were shown, which also showed the playable female character for the first time, who we now know is called Lucia.
We had to wait a long time, but now Rockstar Games has released the first trailer for GTA 6. Felix, Andi and Basti looked particularly closely and summarized all the information and theses about the trailer for you in this talk.
