A third party inquiry jointly initiated by Nvidia, Microsoft, Ubisoft and Samsung has discovered that a recent Lapsus$ ransomware attack on cloud firm Okta was launched by a 16-year-old teenager living in England.
These details were revealed by Bloomberg a couple of hours ago and inquires confirmed that the mastermind behind the cyber attack on Okta, where the source code of a software giant were stolen was also done by the British teen from his residence located 5 miles from Oxford University of England.
Digging deep into the details, the Lapsus$ Ransomware group started its activities freshly from December 2021 by stealing data from Brazil’s Ministry of Health and locking down the server access until a ransom was paid.
The Brazil’s Telecom operator Claro was also targeted in the cyber incident and ransom ranging in millions was picked up for the decryption key.
The Lapsus also targeted impresa, a TV channel and newspaper firm from Portugal, and it took control of the website and the twitter account before demanding millions to release access.
Nvidia falling prey to Lapsus$ ransomware pulled the attention of the world towards it as the firm’s source code and designs of motherboards meant to work on MacOS, Windows and Linux Oses was stolen.
Samsung also fell prey to the Lapsus$ gang, where 190GB data of sensitive files were also stolen by the cyber criminals.
This made the tech companies initiate a forensic investigation through a third party and they found the activities conducted for Lapsus$ were being done through a computer from England by a teenager.
Sadly, the mother of the teenager was interrogated by the law enforcement about the crime and stated that she wasn’t aware of her son’s involvement in any such cyber incident/s.
More details will be updated shortly after confirmation!
NOTE- A couple of days back, Okta confirmed that the Lapsus$ ransomware incident affected over 2.5% of its customers and the hack took place as hackers somehow got hold of admin credentials from one of its employees in January this year.
