Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

> The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.

>Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.

This sounds too fantastical to be true.

This guy is obviously brilliant, disappointing that he squandered his opportunities.

View on HN

I suspect this is being brought up in an attempt to demonize and pump up this guy's hacking skills to reduce the embarrassment of targeted companies but also of police. He presumably was in police custody at the time and they were meant to deny him internet access, but weren't competent enough to understand that these devices can be rooted & turned into a general-purpose computer. Therefore, rather than admitting this (obvious) mistake, they're trying to make it sound like installing a chrooted Linux environment or RDP/SSH client on such a device is some advanced hacking skill.

> This sounds too fantastical to be true.

Use Firestick as RDP/VNC client, use mobile phone for internet, obtain keyboard from Amazon Shopping, remote into a VM, proceed as usual?

Yeah unfortunately rather obvious considering Fire Sticks run android and allow you to enable remote ADB.

Like sure, it is technically possible he runs termux, has all of his hacking tools available, and is amazingly good with an onscreen keyboard.

That being said, if this were an episode of CSI, I would be rolling my eyes.

> has all of his hacking tools available

So there's this wonderful program called wget.

It really doesn’t sound that crazy. Like, almost everyone on this forum is capable of doing this from a technical perspective, right? Almost none of us would have the desire to do this, but we could figure it out if we did…

Use phone, ring overworked admin.

Yea, too bad Aaron Schwarz squandered his.

It's fucked up what they did to him publicly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com