The Rise of the Hacking Group LAPSUS$

CYBER

VICE

Tech News, News & Politics, Technology, News

4 • 645 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It started with SIM swapping and escalated into hacks of Okta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and EA. They’re LAPSUS$, a hacking collective that’s been the boogeyman of big corporations for the past few years. People have wondered about their motivations and identities.

Now, seven of them have been arrested. They’re mostly teenagers who used unsophisticated methods to get the better of some of the world’s most powerful companies.

On today’s episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox walks us through what happened. It’s the subject of his story “LAPSUS$: How a Sloppy Extortion Gang Became One of the Most Prolific Hacking Groups.”

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live on Wednesdays at 4pm EST. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Tann, it's got the code it's going to launch.
0:09.0	It's a unit system.
0:11.0	I know this.
0:13.0	It's how all the files of the whole park.
0:15.0	It tells her everything.
0:17.0	Sir, he's uploading the virus.
0:19.0	Eagle One, the package is being delivered.
0:25.3	Hello, cyber listeners, and hello, Twitch stream.
0:29.7	I'm Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Jason Kebler, and I'm here today with Joseph Cox, our senior staff writer, Joseph, hello. How are you?
0:38.3	All good, thank you.
0:46.3	Thanks for being here. Today we're going to talk about the Lapsis hacking crew, extortion gang, whatever you want to call them. The group that has recently popped, Octa, Microsoft, NVIDIA, EA. Who else?
0:56.3	Samsung as well, is the other main one. And then a bunch of other companies that we'll
1:01.3	probably get into as well. But those are the main ones, yeah. And I mean, if the hack is
1:05.2	broken to any one of those companies, they'd probably be deemed successful, right?
1:08.6	But Lapsis has had a pretty good run since last year.
1:12.9	Right. So as we're recording this, you just published a big feature about who Lapsis is, what they're
1:20.3	doing, what we need to know about them, that sort of thing. And I really want to talk about all that.
1:25.3	But the first, and I think probably biggest
1:27.6	news, is that a lot of them got arrested mere moments ago, like 15 minutes ago.
1:35.2	Yeah, yeah. Just as we hit publish, City of London police then said, obviously in the UK,
1:41.0	then said that they'd arrested seven suspected members of the group.
1:46.4	They, I don't think they released their names at the time because, you know, they're going to be
	...

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