A 20 year old hacker was arrested on Tuesday evening in the Dutch town of Maastricht, after the youngster had previously hacked himself into game developers Activision and Valve. The evildoer is being charged and questioned for downloading Activision's video game Enemy Territory: Quake War whilst it was still in development. Leaking the game would've led to estimated damages of 25 million US Dollars. Apart from hacking Activision, the hacker also broke into a third-party site used by Valve to handle the Cyber Café business partner program, which is part of the game distribution network Steam.
The man from a country Austin Power's dad doesn't like distributed photos of his Valve hack as proof, using the very nerdy pseudonym MaddoxX. As if illegally entering the virtual premises of two game developers weren't enough, Mr. MaddoxX is also being charged with stealing credit card data of 50.000 customers from an English tickets site. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the hacker managed to burn 13 million Euros playing poker online and shopping for notebooks, flat screens and MP3 players.
A crime unit of the Dutch police called Team High Tech Crime (THTC) was responsible for the bust. The THTC was founded to police networks and communication systems in the Netherlands and tackle crimes using or directed against information and communication technolgy. The THTC is located in the Dutch town of Driebergen. There's more coverage here. X