A Florida teenager accused of orchestrating one of last summer’s Twitter hacks – he used celebrity accounts to earn more than $ 100,000 in a cryptocurrency scam – pleaded guilty in Tuesday to ‘ a sentence of three years.
Authorities said Graham Ivan Clark, now 18, and two other men used social engineering and other techniques to gain access to internal Twitter systems. They allegedly used their control to take over 130 accounts on Twitter. A small example of the account holders include President Joe Biden, founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, pop star Kanye West, and philanthropist and founder of Microsoft and former CEO and chairman Bill Gates.
Take time
The accused, prosecutors claimed, then caused the sensational accounts – many with millions of followers – to promote scams that promised to double the proceeds if people deposited bitcoins in the wallet with attackers. The scheme raised more than $ 117,000. The hackers also took over accounts with short usernames, which are highly sought after in a criminal hacking circle calling themselves OGusers.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Clark agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a three-year prison sentence, followed by a three-year probation. The deal allows Clark to be sentenced as a ‘juvenile offender’, a status that allows him to avoid a minimum sentence of ten years he would receive if convicted as an adult.
Clark will serve time in a state prison designated for young adults, and he may be eligible to serve some of his sentence in a military boat camp. He will also receive the mandatory minimum if he violates the conditions of his probationary period.
The plea agreement barred Clark from using computers without the permission and supervision of law enforcement. He must be subjected to searches in his property and must give up the passwords for any accounts he controls.
Careful research
An investigator who worked with the FBI on the investigation into the Twitter violation said the hack was the result of a careful investigation that Clark and the other two hackers conducted on Twitter employees. They started by scraping LinkedIn in search of Twitter employees who would likely have access to their account tools. The hackers then use features that LinkedIn makes available to recruiters to obtain the employees’ cell phone numbers and other private contact information.
The attackers called the employees and used the information obtained from LinkedIn and other public sources to convince them that they were authorized Twitter staff. Work-at-home arrangements caused by the COVID-19 pandemic also prevented employees from using normal procedures, such as contacting in person to verify the identity of the callers.
“Give back to the community”
With the confidence of the employees targeted, the attackers sent them to a phishing page that mimicked an internal Twitter VPN. The attackers then got their own IDs when the targeted employees entered them. To circumvent the two-factor authentication security that Twitter has in place, the attackers entered the referrers on the correct Twitter VPN portal within seconds of the employees entering their information into the fake one. Once the employee entered the one-time password, the attackers were in.
The hackers then took over celebrity accounts and used them to create a scam with cryptocurrency.
“I’m giving back to the community,” a report by President Joe Biden soon tweeted. ‘All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be doubled! If you send $ 1,000, I’ll send $ 2,000 back. Just do it for 30 minutes … Enjoy it! ”
Similar tweets come from other celebrity reports.
Clark appeared at a video conference during Tuesday’s trial at Hillsborough County Jail, where he has been detained since his arrest. Mason Sheppard, 19, and Nima Fazeli, 22, are facing federal charges for their alleged role in the Twitter intrusion and cryptocurrency fraud.