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Welcome to Tech News Briefing.

It's Monday, October 7th. I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street Journal.

A new breed of fearless young cyber criminals is worrying authorities. They are

gamers, hackers, and online con artists, teenagers who are native English speakers and part of a sprawling set of online communities called the Com.

They've been able to talk their way into sensitive networks

and members have broken into systems of some of the top tech companies including

Uber and NVIDIA. Today we're going to tell you the story of one of the most notorious hackers

and explain what makes them different from other cyber criminals.

In September 2022, UK police arrested 17-year-old Aryan Cretage for his alleged role in a prominent hacking group. It wasn't the first time Kirtage had been arrested for offenses connected to cyber attacks on major

companies. There are many surprising things about this story.

Critage's age, the scale of the hacks,

and the fact that he's part of an online community of young people involved in cyber crime.

Here to tell us more is our reporter, Robert McMillan. And Bob, I just want to note that your

reporting for this story is based on court records, online chats, and posts and interviews

with police, cyber security inspectors, and others familiar with Kirtage and his case.

So Bob, tell us about Arian Kirtage's background.

Arian had a pretty tough childhood. I mean, he's autistic autistic he has a lot of behavior issues. He grew up in Oxford just sort of outside of London and you know his parents separated when he was young. He never really fit in in school, but when he was pretty young, you know, through the internet he found a community where he seemed to excel.

So around age 11, he started getting into these hacking forums and video game related hacking type things that he was doing and from there he found a lot of success and he quickly advanced to the point where just a few years later he was

...