Biggest Twitter Attack: 17-Year-Old From Florida Hacked

In the United States, a 17-year-old teenager was arrested on charges of organizing the largest hacker attack on Twitter, during which the accounts of pop stars, politicians and top businessmen were hacked. Writes about it with the BBC.

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Prosecutor Andrew Warren charged the teenager with 30 counts of "conning people across the country." A total of three people were arrested in this case, two from the US and one from the UK.

According to the Hillsborough County District Attorney's Office, the allegations include such serious charges as organized fraud and criminal use of personal information.

During the July 15 hacker attack, the accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian were uncovered, on behalf of whom calls for Bitcoin donations were posted on Twitter.

As shown by the list of transactions with bitcoins available for public viewing, the 17-year-old hacker was able to get more than $ 100 thousand in cryptocurrency in this way.

“When stolen, Bitcoin, which is a cryptocurrency, is difficult to trace and recover,” Warren said in a statement. “These crimes were committed using the names of celebrities, but they were not the main victims, this fraud was perpetrated against ordinary Americans across the country, including here in Florida. This major crime was planned right under our noses and we will not tolerate it.”

On the subject: How an immigrant from Azerbaijan became an engineer on Twitter and sold them an idea for $ 50 million

According to Warren, the FBI, the Department of Justice and the intelligence services of several states conducted a coordinated investigation throughout the country, which resulted in the arrest of the suspect in Hillsborough County.

The attorney stressed that the hacker, who lives in Tampa, will be tried under state law, not federal law, since Florida law suggests that he can be charged as an adult.

“We appreciate the swift response of law enforcement in this investigation and will continue to cooperate with them,” Twitter said in a statement. “For our part, we will be as transparent as possible and will regularly report details of the case.”

The company also added that it has taken serious steps to restrict access to internal systems and tools while the investigation continues.

The cybersecurity community is of the opinion that attackers have misled Twitter employees during a phone call. Using the so-called phishing technique, Internet scammers in the course of a confidential conversation lull the vigilance of company employees and extorted important information from them, which allowed them to penetrate the operating system.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• Twitter accounts of many famous people underwent a massive hack Wednesday evening, July 15th. Unknown hackers posted messages of the same type with an offer to earn bitcoins.
• “All bitcoins sent to the address below will be returned in double size. If you send 1000 dollars, I will return 2000 dollars. I’ve been doing this only for 30 minutes, ”read businessman Ilon Musk on a Twitter message.
• Similar messages appeared in the accounts of billionaire and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, rapper Kanye West, former U.S. President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many other famous people, and also large companies, including Apple and Uber. On the Apple page, after hacking, messages disappeared.
• Judging by the same tweets, the attacks on the pages of the "stars" were coordinated. After some time, the Twitter administration discovered malicious activity and blocked the ability to publish to the owners of verified accounts. Hacker messages have been deleted.
• The near-simultaneous hacking of multiple accounts protected by two-factor authentication suggests that the attackers didn't just hack into individual users' accounts - they had at least indirect access to Twitter's internal tools.

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