17-Year-Old Arrested As Mastermind Of Twitter Hack Of Elon Musk, Obama, Others
One of the greatest Twitter hacks of recent times now has a suspect in custody
Twitter had some serious doubts raised on its security when accounts of celebrities on the microblogging website were hacked one by one on July 15.
Reuters
A strange message asking people to transfer bitcoin was seen on all the accounts, promising double the bitcoins in return.
A long list of celebrity Twitter accounts was plagued by the hack, including those of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Joseph Biden Jr as well as the former US president Barack Obama. It was considered to be the work of a mastermind, someone with years of experience of hacking through secure servers.
Authorities have now nabbed the culprit and it turns out that a 17-year-old recent high school graduate from Florida was the brains behind the coordinated Twitter cyber attacks. Named Graham Ivan Clark, the 17-year-old has now been arrested from his Tampa apartment and faces 30 felony charges as an adult.
(Representative Image: Getty Images)
Documents released on Friday by the prosecutors mention that the prime suspect in the attacks went by the name of ¡®Kirk¡¯ and had two aids in the cyber attacks.
Twitter hack cyber heist
¡°This was not an ordinary 17-year-old,¡± Andrew Warren, the Florida state attorney handling the case is quoted as saying in a report by New York Times. Warren pointed this out as the culprit was able to go unnoticed inside Twitter¡¯s network for carrying out the attacks.
Kirk posed as a co-worker from the technology department to one of Twitter¡¯s employees. He asked for the employee¡¯s credentials from the employee in order to access the customer service portal. The move let him slip into 130 Twitter accounts by the end of the attack.
Twitter accounts of Elon Musk (L), Barack Obama (M) and Bill Gates (R) were hacked during the cyber attack
As per a New York Times estimate, the hackers were able to raise $180,000 in Bitcoin by the end of the attack.
Though the attack was conducted successfully by the convicted, they left traces of their identity in the midst. Authorities were quickly able to connect the dots to identify those responsible behind the attack.
In response to the attack, Twitter claims to have ¡°significantly limited access¡± to its internal tools and systems in a recent thread. In addition, it is also trying to improve its methods for ¡°detecting and preventing inappropriate access¡± to its internal systems.
