London police have arrested seven teenagers with suspected links to the Lapsus$ hacker group. This hacker syndicate is believed to be the mastermind behind the hacking of several large technology companies such as Samsung and Microsoft.
"City of London Police have launched an investigation with partners into members of the hacking group," Detective Superintendent Michael O'Sullivan said in a statement.
"Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been detained in connection with this investigation and all have been released for investigation. Our investigation remains ongoing."
The Lapsus$ hacker syndicate claimed responsibility for the large-scale hacking experienced by tech companies, including Nvidia, Samsung, Ubisoft, Okta, and Microsoft.
Before news of the detentions broke, a report revealed that a teenager living in Oxford, England was the leader of the group. But London Police did not say whether the teenager was one of the seven detained.
The identity of the leader of the Lapsus$ group was successfully revealed thanks to some angry consumers who exposed their identity through doxing. According to a report by cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs, the leader of the syndicate bought Doxbin, a site where people can search for other people's personal information.
But the leader of the hacker group could not manage the site properly. He reportedly gave up control of the site in January, but leaked all of the Doxbin dataset to Telegram, and the Doxbin community later retaliated by leaking his identity.
BBC News then interviewed the teenager's father. He claimed not to know his son's activities and his involvement with a hacker syndicate.
"I didn't know anything about any of this until recently. He never talked about hacking anything, but he is really good at using computers and spends a lot of time in front of computers," said the teenager's father.
"I always thought that he was just playing games. We will try to stop him from using the computer," he continued.