Authorities in Tampa, Florida have arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark for being the alleged brain of a bitcoin hack on Twitter. On 15 July 2020, he targeted several major accounts. According to the Ministry of Justice, two other men were accused of complicity in the hack. They are Mason Sheppard (aka “Chaewon”), 19, from Bognor Regis, UK, and Nima Fazeli (aka “Rolex”), 22, from Orlando, Florida.
Hack on Twitter directed by a 17-year-old boy
Sheppard was accused of “conspiracy to commit online fraud, conspiracy to launder money and intentionally access a protected computer.” Fazeli was accused of “helping and inducing intentional access to a protected computer.” Both Sheppard and Fazeli were filed in northern California. Clark will be prosecuted in Hillsborough County.
Hillsborough Attorney Andrew Warren has filed charges against juvenile offenders for 30 crimes, including organized fraud, fraudulent use of personal data of 30 or more victims, unauthorized access to a computer or electronic device, and 17 communications frauds.
Hacked tweets directed followers to send Bitcoins to accounts associated with the Tampa teenager. “After investigating the attack, our investigators worked quickly to determine who was responsible for them and to locate those individuals,” FBI Special Agent John L. Bennett said in a statement.
Kelly R. Jackson, an IRS special agent, said her Cyber ​​Crimes Unit analyzed blockchain transactions and deanonymized them, allowing them to identify two of the hackers mentioned above.
The hack on Twitter was organized through a phishing attack that targeted several of its employees. The perpetrator then “used his credentials to access our internal systems and obtain information about our processes.” The hack originally targeted Bitcoin-related accounts, but then expanded to include accounts of celebrities and politicians.
The company said the attacker targeted 130 accounts, tweeted from 45 of them, opened 36 DM inboxes and copied data from seven accounts. Twitter said it is now improving its “intrusion detection and prevention methods” to its internal systems and “prioritizing security work” across its teams.
Twitter later wrote:
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