UK Cops Collar 7 Suspected Lapsus$ Gang Members
London Police can't say if they nabbed the 17-year-old suspected mastermind & multimillionaire – but researchers say they’ve been tracking an Oxford teen since mid-2021.
Coverage of incidents reportedly linked to LAPSUS$, with analysis of infrastructure and disruption, security impact, and defensive guidance.
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Background for this topic.
LAPSUS$ is a name used in public reporting for an intrusion set associated with several high-profile compromises, particularly during 2021–2022. Investigations and victim disclosures linked the activity to social engineering, stolen credentials, account takeover—including reported abuse of help-desk or telecom recovery processes—and theft or attempted extortion of data and source code. Attribution, membership, and the relationship between individual incidents remain subject to change, so reports should be assessed for the evidence supporting each linkage.
Its security significance is the demonstrated exposure of identity and support workflows rather than reliance on a single malware family. Defenders should prioritize phishing-resistant multifactor authentication for privileged users, tightly control password resets and number-porting requests, limit administrator access, and monitor unusual identity-provider, cloud, and repository activity. After a suspected compromise, revoke sessions and tokens, rotate credentials and exposed secrets, preserve authentication and support-desk logs, and determine what data or code was accessed. These steps also help distinguish confirmed intrusion facts from claims made during extortion or incomplete early reporting.
London Police can't say if they nabbed the 17-year-old suspected mastermind & multimillionaire – but researchers say they’ve been tracking an Oxford teen since mid-2021.
The data-extortion gang got at Microsoft's Azure DevOps server. Meanwhile, fellow Lapsus$ victim and authentication firm Okta said 2.5 percent of customers were affected in its own Lapsus$ attack.
Lapsus$ shared screenshots of internal Okta systems and 40Gb of purportedly stolen Microsoft data on Bing, Bing Maps and Cortana.