Microsoft, Nvidia And Many Others Just Got Hacked By Some Kids

A short while ago, we covered the concerning news that Nvidia, the gaming (and unintentional crypto mining) hardware giant, had been hacked by Lapsus$, a hacker group that stole critical company data that allowed for the spread of malware capable of bypassing our Nvidia-friendly security systems. More recently, we saw two very important developments in that case. The first revealed that the very same group had also hacked Samsung, Ubisoft, and even Microsoft. Lapsus$ got access to a large part of Bing's source engine as well as Cortana's, the Microsoft AI assistant – not the AI from Halo that automatically masturbates the Masterchief. The second, and certainly more interesting development to that story, is that the perpetrators are allegedly less like a very serious-looking group of hackers like the hackers from Hackers,

, and more like the kid hacker from Hackers.

Yeah, a report by Bloomberg has revealed that the person behind most of the attacks is allegedly a 16-year old from the UK, and one of the other key figures is yet another 16-year old, this one from Brazil. This should come off as a fun and edgy ‘2020s version of the “they grow up so fast” meme and not as an attempt to paint the group as harmless – because they're the real deal. Lapsus$ ran such an effective campaign because they'd been successfully enlisting employees of the companies they were hitting, and one of the reasons the cybersecurity experts didn't originally think the 16-year old was the one behind the attacks is because he was so good they thought his moves were automated. These pesky kids are so insidious they even managed to use stolen information to enter Zoom calls so they could further extort their victims.

If there's one reassuring takeaway from all this, it's that the cybersleuths responsible for catching the perpetrators did so because, despite offensive abilities, they too operated under poor operational security.

Top Image: MGM