The UK police have finally made an arrest in one of the world’s biggest cases of hacking. Back in 2020, a team of programmers, hacked into Twitter and accessed the account of several prominent individuals and major companies, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Apple.
These companies and people found themselves embroiled in a troublesome situation after hackers successfully took control of their Twitter accounts and started promoting a crypto scam.
Twitter, back then, described the incident as a “coordinated social engineering attack,” whereby the hackers deceived Twitter staff to gain access to “internal systems and tools.” The company acknowledged that they were investigating the extent of the hackers’ activities and the information they may have accessed, aside from posting tweets from the compromised accounts.
In an unprecedented move to combat the hack, Twitter had to implement a complete halt on all tweeting activities by verified accounts. The majority of the accounts were restored soon, but Twitter issued a warning that additional actions might be taken. The company took the step of locking the compromised accounts and restricting access to internal systems and tools while they continue their investigation.
According to the report, Joseph James O’Connor, the individual identified as the hacker, admitted his wrongdoing in a New York court, after he was arrested and extradited from Spain on April 26 last year. Almost two years ago, O’Connor was apprehended in Spain for infiltrating over 130 Twitter accounts in July 2020.
Among the targeted accounts were those belonging to prominent figures such as Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Elon Musk, who currently owns Twitter.
The hacker and his accomplices used the hacked Twitter accounts to promote a traditional Bitcoin fraud scheme, where they promised their followers a doubled amount of money if they sent cryptocurrency to a designated Bitcoin wallet.
Kenneth A Polite Jr, an assistant attorney general in the US justice department’s criminal division, expressed that O’Connor’s criminal actions were evident and malicious, significantly impacting the lives of multiple individuals.
O’Connor engaged in acts of harassment, threats, and extortion, causing significant emotional distress to his victims. To maintain anonymity, O’Connor resorted to using a computer to conceal his identity through stealth accounts and aliases originating from locations outside of the United States.
Also read: Hackers who targeted some of Twitter’s top users reap bitcoin worth $120,000
This is not the first instance where Twitter has faced an internal threat. In 2017, a customer support employee briefly deleted Donald Trump’s account, while in 2019, two former employees faced charges of espionage for allegedly accessing and providing the account information of numerous users to the government of Saudi Arabia.
Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,
India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Credit: Source link
