London police have arrested seven suspects in connection with the hacker group Lapsus$. The gang has been linked to hacking large companies such as Microsoft and Okta.
The Lapsus$ gang has claimed a string of cyber-attacks against major tech companies in recent weeks, but now the investigation into the group appears to be moving quickly. Yesterday it was revealed that the gang leader would be a British teenager from Oxford who previously also owned a well-known ‘doxxing’ forum.
Now police in London told the BBC that they had arrested seven suspects in the case. All suspects are between the ages of 16 and 21, according to police. It is not clear whether the Oxford boy is among them. They were released after their arrest but remain suspects.
Bloomberg news agency reports that researchers link about seven accounts to the group, including the sixteen-year-old from Oxford, but also a teenager in Brazil. In the meantime, on the Telegram channel of the gang itself, it is said that some members are ‘on vacation’.
Earlier this month, Lapsus$ broke into the account of an employee of Okta, which makes authentication software for other companies. The gang also attacked Microsoft, posting stolen source code from Cortana and Bing, among other things. A few weeks ago, the group also claimed attacks on Nvidia and Samsung.
An extensive report from Microsoft about the gang, which the company calls DEV-0537, says they use social engineering and SIM swapping as tactics to get into organizations, among other things. But, according to Microsoft, the group is sloppy in covering its tracks, which may explain the speed of the current investigation.