Arion Kurtaj, the hacker found responsible for the 2022 breach of Rockstar Games that put 90 unreleased Grand Theft Auto 6 videos online, has been released from the secure hospital where he had been held since 2023 and is now in prison awaiting a retrial.
BBC correspondent Joe Tidy, who covered the original case and sentencing, said on Bluesky that Kurtaj is out of hospital and in a normal prison awaiting retrial, PC Gamer reported. The retrial is currently scheduled for November, the same month Grand Theft Auto 6 is due to launch on consoles.
Kurtaj was 18 when a UK court found him to be part of Lapsus$, the group behind attacks on companies including BT, Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar. The Rockstar breach produced what PC Gamer described at the time as one of the biggest leaks in video game history: 90 clips of varying lengths uploaded to the GTAForums fan site more than a year before the first official GTA 6 trailer.
The circumstances of that hack were unusual. It was carried out while Kurtaj was under police protection at a Travelodge hotel, reportedly using only an Amazon Firestick, the television in his room and a mobile phone.
Why the original sentence was open-ended
A psychiatric assessment found that Kurtaj has acute autism and, more consequentially for the case, that he was highly motivated and continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible, even while in custody for earlier offences. Because of that assessment, the jury was asked only whether Kurtaj had committed the hacks, not whether he had done so with criminal intent.
He was sentenced in 2023 to detention in a secure hospital, for life or until doctors determined he was no longer a danger. That determination has now apparently been made.
How the retrial will proceed is not yet clear. Tidy has said he is pursuing that question, but reported that police have not commented on it.
was like getting blood out of a stone
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