Cybersecurity investigators have uncovered the identity of the alleged mastermind of the dreaded ‘Lapsus$’ hacker group who is believed to be a 16-year-old British whiz kid who lives with his mother in Oxford, southern England.
Better known by the pseudonyms “White” or “Breachbase”, this young and talented teenager would have hacking skills so advanced that the investigators first believed that they were observing the activity of a computer program, reports the media American Bloomberg.
Wanted for a series of “hacking” against large companies such as Microsoft, Samsung or Ubisoft, the group of hackers was first established in Great Britain and South America, before attacking multinationals in telecommunications, media, retail and even some government organizations.
Same operating mode
According to investigators, the group carried out “a large-scale extortion campaign” against several organizations, always using the same modus operandi: hacking into security systems (with the help of several employees within the attacked companies ), steal sensitive data, and demand ransoms for not disclosing it publicly on the internet.
Despite their talent, the young hackers would have taken big risks such as “announcing their attacks on social networks, or revealing their intention to buy identifiers from employees of the targeted companies”, report the investigators. Excessive zeal and “poor operational security” which cost them dearly, since the investigators managed to link the cyberattacks to each other, and to identify certain perpetrators, not without the help of rival hackers, who had notably published on the Internet the personal information of the leader of the Lapsus$ group (surname, first name, address, etc.).
To date, however, there is no formal proof of the responsibility of the young adolescent, nor of his possible motive. He has not been officially charged by the courts, at least for the moment. The band didn’t seem too affected by the revelations either as they recently said on social media that “some of our members have vacations until March 30, 2022, we might be quiet for a while, thank you to understand us, we will try to release more information as soon as possible”.