Hacker liable for 2020 Twitter breach sentenced to jail

Three years after some of the seen hacks in latest historical past performed out in real-time in entrance of hundreds of thousands of Twitter customers, one of many hackers liable for the breach will now serve time in federal jail.

Joseph James O’Connor, 24, was sentenced Friday in a New York federal court docket to 5 years in jail after pleading responsible in Might to 4 counts of laptop hacking, wire fraud and cyberstalking. O’Connor additionally agreed to forfeit not less than $794,000 to the victims of his crimes.

O’Connor, a U.Okay. citizen, was extradited from Spain on the request of U.S. prosecutors earlier this yr and has remained in custody since.

Within the listening to, Choose Jed S. Rakoff mentioned O’Connor will possible serve about half of his sentence after spending greater than two years in pre-trial custody.

O’Connor confronted a most of 77 years in jail, in accordance with Reuters. Justice Division prosecutors known as for O’Connor to serve not less than seven years in jail.

In court docket, O’Connor mentioned his crimes had been “silly and pointless,” apologized to his victims, and requested the choose for leniency.

Based on prosecutors, O’Connor “used his subtle technological skills for malicious functions — conducting a fancy SIM swap assault to steal massive quantities of cryptocurrency, hacking Twitter, conducting laptop intrusions to take over social media accounts, and even cyberstalking two victims, together with a minor sufferer.”

The federal government mentioned O’Connor, identified by his on-line deal with PlugWalkJoe, was a part of a gaggle that broke into dozens of high-profile Twitter accounts, together with Apple, Binance, Invoice Gates, Joe Biden and Elon Musk to unfold cryptocurrency get-rich-quick scams in July 2020.

O’Connor used phone-based social engineering strategies to trick Twitter workers into granting the group of hackers entry to Twitter’s community. One of many different hackers convicted of the Twitter breach, Graham Ivan Clark, also referred to as Kirk, used the entry to Twitter’s community to abuse an inner admin software to hijack and reassign Twitter consumer accounts.

A screenshot of the Twitter admin panel that the hackers breached so as to reassign entry to Twitter consumer accounts. Picture Credit: TechCrunch (equipped)

Twitter quickly blocked customers from posting to the positioning because it grappled with the intrusion, as hundreds of thousands of customers watched in real-time as their timelines flooded with cryptocurrency scams from a number of the most recognizable names on the planet.

A subsequent investigation by New York’s state authorities, which accused Twitter of insufficient cybersecurity protections, discovered that the hackers broke in by “calling Twitter workers and claiming to be from Twitter’s IT division,” then hijacked the Twitter accounts of politicians, celebrities, and entrepreneurs to tweet “double your bitcoin” scams.

The rip-off netted about $120,000, in accordance with public blockchain information.

A number of of the tweets that had been revealed throughout the 2020 Twitter hack. Picture Credit: TechCrunch

The breach prompted Twitter to enhance its cybersecurity controls, introducing {hardware} safety keys for its workers to stop future phishing makes an attempt.

Two years on from the hack, extra explosive allegations concerning the breach got here to gentle.

Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who was employed as Twitter’s head of safety months after the breach, later described the hacker’s entry as attaining “god mode,” which allowed them to imposter-tweet from any account they needed. Zatko known as the incident “the biggest hack of a social media platform in historical past” in a whistleblower criticism filed with federal regulators in 2022, through which Zatko accused his former employer of cybersecurity failings.

Twitter auto-replied with a poop emoji in response to an emailed request for remark, because it has executed since a short while after Elon Musk acquired the corporate.