Source: Yahoo News
Two teenagers were charged by London police this week who were connected to a probe into the hackers of the Lapsus$ extortion group. The city police arrested the two minors in relation with an ongoing investigation into the hacking. The boys, aged 16 and 17 appeared at the Highbury Corner youth court in London, on Friday, April 1. They were charged with a significant number of cyber offences. Currently, they are released on bail, subject to some conditions.
Their arrest was connected to an investigation by international police into the extortion group. Lapsus$. This hacking gang was involved in penetrating through the systems of major technology companies. Over the last few month, it was involved in hacking Microsoft Corp, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Company Ltd, and Nvidia. Moreover, they even appeared to celebrate their breach online after hacking Microsoft
They were charged with three instances of unauthorised access with harmful intentions. Specifically, they targeted to hinder or block the working of access to a computer. Along with it, two occurrences of fraud by means of false representation.
“Both teenagers have been charged with: three counts of unauthorised access to a computer with intent to impair the reliability of data; one count of fraud by false representation and one count of unauthorised access to a computer with intent to hinder access to data,” City of London detective inspector Michael O’Sullivan said in the statement.
How the case has proceeded so far:
The boy who is aged 16 has been charged with one count of making a computer to execute a function to secure access, that too unauthorised, to a programme. However, the boys, who wore grey tracksuits to court, cannot be named as they are minors. They are set to be presented at a pretrial hearing at London’s Southwark Crown Court on April 29. According to Prosecutor Valerie Benjamin, the case is being sent there owing to its complexity and involvement of large amounts.
The same police had arrested seven other people last week aged between 16 and 21 in the UK. Currently, the City if London Police is heading the international investigation into Lapsus$ for the its major data breaches. Surprisingly, Lapsus$ made a similar announcement to its Telegram followers around the same time. They said that some of the members of the group would take “a vacation.” However, it restarted posting again on Wednesday, March 30 itself. It released stolen data from a software development firm based in Argentina.