Sat 01 August 2020:
Authorities have charged three men in a major Twitter breach this month that hacked the accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls to scam people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in bitcoin.
The suspects include a 19-year-old British man from Bognor Regis, a 22-year-old man from Orlando, Florida, and a teenager from Tampa, Florida.
Mason Sheppard, a 19-year-old British man who went by the alias Chaewon, was charged with carrying out the hack, as well as related wire fraud and money laundering crimes, according to a Justice Department statement.
Orlando, Florida-based Nima Fazeli, 22, nicknamed Rolex, was charged with aiding and abetting those crimes. The Justice Department did not name the third defendant, but the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office in Tampa, Florida said it had arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark.
In a statement, Twitter said it appreciated the “swift actions of law enforcement.”
The FBI said that two of the accused had been taken into custody, without identifying them.
Clark on July 15 posted messages under the profiles that solicited investments in bitcoin, a digital currency, said the Florida State Attorney’s Office. A publicly available ledger of bitcoin transactions showed he was able to obtain more than $100,000 that way.
The tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
Twitter previously said hackers used a phone to fool the social media company’s employees into giving them access. It said targeted “a small number of employees through a phone spear-phishing attack”.
“This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems,” the company tweeted.
After stealing employee credentials and getting into Twitter’s systems, the hackers were able to target other employees who had access to account support tools, the company said.
The hackers targeted 130 accounts. They managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inboxes of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven. Dutch anti-Islam legislator Geert Wilders has said his inbox was among those accessed.
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