MIAMI (AP) — A British man, a Florida man along with a Florida teen hacked the Twitter accounts of notable politicians, celebrities and tech moguls to scam individuals around world from over $100,000 in Bitcoin, authorities said Friday.
Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was detained Friday at Tampa, where the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office will stun him . He confronts 30 felony charges, according to a news release. Meanwhile, Mason Sheppard, 19, of Bognor Regis, U.K., and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, were billed in California federal court.
In among the most high-profile security breaches in the past couple of years, hackers shipped out counterfeit tweets on July 15 in the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg along with a number of tech billionaires such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates along with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Stars Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were hacked.
The tweets provided to deliver $2,000 for each $1,000 sent to a Bitcoin address.
“There is a false belief inside the criminal community that strikes such as the Twitter hack could be committed anonymously and with no result,” U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson to the Northern District of California stated in a news release. “Today’s charging announcement demonstrates the elation of nefarious hacking into a secure atmosphere for pleasure or benefit will be short-lived. ”
Although the case against the teen was also investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren explained that his office is currently prosecuting Clark in Florida state court since Florida law permits minors to be charged as adults at financial fraud cases such as this if appropriate.
“This suspect resides here in Tampa, he perpetrated the crime , and he’ll be prosecuted here,” Warren explained.
Twitter previously stated hackers used the telephone to deceive the social media business ’s workers into giving them access. It stated hackers targeted a few of workers through a telephone spear-phishing attack. ”
“This attack relied on an important and concerted attempt to mislead certain workers and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems,” the firm tweeted.
After stealing worker credentials and becoming into Twitter’s techniques, the hackers were able to target other workers who had access into account service resources, the business said.
The hackers targeted at 130 accounts. They managed to tweet in 45 accounts, get into the message inboxes of 36, and get the Twitter info out of seven. Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders has stated his tune was one of those accessed.
Spear-phishing is a more targeted form of malware, an impersonation scam that uses email or other electronic messages to deceive recipients into handing over sensitive information.
Twitter stated it would provide a more detailed report later “given the ongoing law enforcement investigation. ”
The business has previously said the episode was a “coordinated social engineering attack” that targeted a number of its workers using internal systems and resources. It didn’t supply any more information about the way the attack was completed, but the details published so far indicate the hackers started by using the conservative method of speaking their way past security.
British cybersecurity analyst Graham Cluley explained his guess was a targeted Twitter worker or contractor obtained a message by telephone asking them to telephone a few.
“When the employee called the amount they might have been taken into a persuasive (but fake) helpdesk operator, that was subsequently able to utilize social engineering tactics to trick the intended victim into handing over their credentials,” Clulely composed Friday on his blog.
It’s also possible that the hackers pretended to phone from the firm ’s valid help lineup by spoofing the amount, ” he explained.
Associated Press Writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
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