The 18-year-old Rockstar hacker who broke into their servers using an Amazon Firestick and leaked GTA 6 clips to social media has been sentenced to a lifetime in a secure hospital.
Arion Kurtaj, who is a member of the hacker organisation known as Lapsus$, has autism. According to the judge who sentenced him, Kurtaj is considered a liability to the public due to his desire to continue engaging in cybercrimes, as reported by the BBC.
Kurtaj was unfit for trial due to the severity of his autism with the jury trying to determine his innocence or culpability based on whether he'd be able to pull off the hacks in the first place - not if he did them with malicious intent.
While Kurtaj's defence tried to make a case by stating that the hacks and information breach didn't severely harm Rockstar, using the recently released Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer's massive success (accumulating over 155 million views on YouTube as of the time of writing) as proof.
For the company, the leaks signified dedicating up to $5 million to recover from it plus continuous stress and thousands of hours of extra work the employees had to endure.
The judge would ultimately invalidate the defence's case, using Rockstar's testimony and that of other companies also attacked by Lapsus$ (including Nvidia and BT/EE) to prove that there was indeed harm done to individuals during these cybercrimes.
As a result of his actions, the hacker will spend the rest of his life in a hospital. That is until doctors deem that he's no longer a harm to society, something that seems unlikely in the near future, as a mental health advisor stated that Kurtaj is eager to return to the world of cybercrime as soon as possible.
Kurtaj wasn't the only Lapsus$ member sentenced. A 17-year-old hacker will spend 18 months in a Youth Rehabilitation centre under intense supervision and a full ban on using VPNs.
He was sentenced for helping Kurtaj steal from individuals by hacking into their cryptocurrency wallets plus stalking and harassing two young women in what the judge described as an "unpleasant and frightening pattern."