An picture of recent Twitter proprietor Elon Musk is seen surrounded by Twitter logos on this photograph illustration in Warsaw, Poland on 08 November, 2022.
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LONDON — A U.Ok. man pleaded responsible to serving to orchestrate a high-profile hack on the Twitter accounts of quite a few celebrities and politicians together with Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Kanye West.
Joseph O’Connor, 23, who is understood below a web based alias as “PlugwalkJoe,” submitted his responsible plea in a New York court docket on Tuesday, based on a Department of Justice press launch. He was extradited from Spain final month.
O’Connor pleaded responsible to conspiracy to commit pc intrusion, committing pc intrusions, making extortive and threatening communications, cyberstalking, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and cash laundering. Combined, the costs carry a most sentence of 77 years, the Justice Department mentioned.
Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite of the Justice Department’s prison division mentioned that O’Connor’s actions have been “flagrant and malicious.”
“He harassed, threatened, and extorted his victims, causing substantial emotional harm,” Polite, Jr. mentioned in a press release Tuesday.
“Like many criminal actors, O’Connor tried to stay anonymous by using a computer to hide behind stealth accounts and aliases from outside the United States. But this plea shows that our investigators and prosecutors will identify, locate, and bring to justice such criminals to ensure they face the consequences for their crimes.”
The assault, which passed off in 2020, focused about 130 folks, Twitter mentioned on the time. Hackers took management of the accounts to advertise a bitcoin rip-off, directing customers to ship the funds to a number of bitcoin addresses.
Twitter mentioned in 2020, shortly after the cyberattack passed off, that it believes the hack was a “coordinated social engineering attack” on its workers — in different phrases, insiders on the firm have been tricked into handing over entry to inner techniques and instruments.
The attackers have been in a position to acquire entry to Twitter’s inner controls by compromising a small variety of workers, based on a July 2020 Twitter blog post.
“O’Connor communicated with others regarding purchasing unauthorized access to a variety of Twitter accounts, including accounts associated with public figures around the world,” the Justice Department mentioned Wednesday.
“A number of Twitter accounts targeted by O’Connor were subsequently transferred away from their rightful owners. O’Connor agreed to purchase unauthorized access to one Twitter account for $10,000.”
‘Impressive path of destruction’
O’Connor was additionally charged and pled responsible for his position in a SIM-swapping assault, which is when an attacker convinces a cell phone provider to switch an individual’s telephone quantity to their machine to bypass multi-factor authentication on on-line accounts.
The assault focused a number of high-profile corporations and executives within the cryptocurrency business together with Binance, Tron founder Justin Sun, and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, and resulted within the theft of $794,000 in digital property, based on the Justice Department. O’Connor agreed to forfeit the $794,000 to the court docket and to pay restitution to the victims of his crimes, the DOJ mentioned.
O’Connor additionally compromised the account of “one of the most highly visible TikTok accounts” and threatened to launch delicate, private materials associated to the cyberattack sufferer to people who joined a specified server on the chat app Discord, the Justice Department mentioned.
U.S. Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey for the Northern District of California mentioned O’Connor “left an impressive trail of destruction” within the wake of his wave of criminality.
“This case serves as a warning that the reach of the law is long, and criminals anywhere who use computers to commit crimes may end up facing the consequences of their actions in places they did not anticipate,” Ramsey mentioned.
O’Connor was considered one of 4 people charged over the scheme. In 2021, American teenager Graham Ivan Clark pleaded responsible to fraud costs.
Nima Fazeli of Orlando, Florida, and Mason Sheppard, of Bognor Regis within the U.Ok. have additionally been charged in relation to the hack.
Source: www.cnbc.com”