UK teen accused of leading cyber attacks on Microsoft and Nvidia

A UK teen from Oxford has been accused of being one of the leaders of the hacking group Lapsus$, reportedly responsible for recent cyber attacks on Nvidia, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Samsung and Vodafone.

The 16-year-old, who has allegedly amassed a fortune of $14m (£10.6m) from hacking, was doxxed by rival hackers who shared his personal details online.

City of London Police have arrested seven teenagers in relation to Lapsus$, but have not stated if this teen is one of them. All have been released under investigation.

The boy's father spoke to the BBC, but was unaware of any hacking.

"I had never heard about any of this until recently," he said. "He's never talked about any hacking, but he is very good on computers and spends a lot of time on the computer. I always thought he was playing games.

He added: "We're going to try to stop him from going on computers."

As first reported by Bloomberg, the teen - who goes by the alias "White" - is believed to be the mastermind behind the hacking group. Lapsus$ has evaded cybersecurity experts and is believed to be motivated by money and notoriety.

Another member of the group is suspected to be a teenager living in Brazil.

In a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft confirmed Lapsus$ was behind a recent breach, stating "Microsoft Security teams have been actively tracking a large-scale social engineering and extortion campaign against multiple organisations".

Lapsus$ was also behind a recent attack on Nvidia and posted stolen source code online. It then followed with an attack on Samsung.

Police inquiries remain ongoing.