British teen arrested in hacking case

British police arrested a 17-year-old from Oxfordshire, England, on Thursday as part of a hacking investigation, the City of London Police announced Friday.

The agency declined to share any additional information Friday morning, as did the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, whose National Cyber Crime Unit supported the investigation.

While it’s not yet clear who the suspect is, the arrest comes eight days after Uber’s systems were breached, followed shortly after by the high-profile hack of Rockstar Games, with the attacker leaking development footage from the highly anticipated upcoming installment of the Grand Theft Auto video game.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning.

An Uber statement on Sept. 19 blamed Lapsus$ for the intrusion. Lapsus$ is a hacking group that had successfully targeted major corporations such as Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta and Ubisoft in a string of hacks in the spring of 2022.

British police arrested seven people in late March, aged 16 to 21, as part of an investigation into Lapsus$. Two of the suspects in that case, aged 16 and 17, were charged with three counts of unauthorized access to a computer with intent to impair the reliability of the data, one count of fraud by false representation and one count of unauthorized access to a computer with intent to hinder access to data. The 16-year-old faced an additional count of causing a computer to perform a function to secure unauthorized access to a program.

Ahead of the arrests, Bloomberg reported that a 16-year-old British teenager, who went by online aliases including “White” and “breachbase,” was the mastermind of the attacks. That teenager, along with several family members, was doxxed in March, ahead of the Bloomberg story.

The people behind the release of that information posted an additional note Sept. 18 claiming the teen was responsible for hacking Uber and Rockstar Games and said he “works with a team of (not-so) skilled individuals who use him as a front man/mule to spread the word of said breaches.” On Friday, the people posted again, citing the arrest and saying that “his OPSEC was obsolete and his friends used him as a mule.”