It seems nowadays that instead of going to college, one can just hack into a website or service and get recruited by some big name company like Microsoft. The 14 year old from Dublin, Ireland had broken into the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 servers in 2011 and started a phishing scam to get user information.
Microsoft had initially thought the attack was a part of the same attack against the PlayStation Network and issued an alert. Word of the collaboration between Microsoft and the 14-year-old (name not revealed) came straight from the software giant itself, but was to retract those statements a week later (typical Microsoft!). Read part of the statement:
‘Mr. Rellis was commenting on various developers and hobbyists using drivers that allow other devices to display the raw data output from Kinect for Xbox 360 sensors. Microsoft can also confirm that the company has not offered to mentor a 14-year-old from Tallaght who purportedly was related to a phishing scheme.’