UK man pleads guilty to Twitter hack that compromised accounts of Joe Biden, Elon Musk

LONDON — A U.Okay. man pleaded responsible to serving to orchestrate a high-profile hack on the Twitter accounts of quite a few celebrities and politicians together with Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Kanye West.

Joseph O’Connor, 23, who is understood below a web based alias as “PlugwalkJoe,” submitted his responsible plea in a New York courtroom on Tuesday, in line with a Department of Justice press launch. He was extradited from Spain final month.

O’Connor pleaded responsible to conspiracy to commit laptop intrusion, committing laptop intrusions, making extortive and threatening communications, cyberstalking, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and cash laundering. Combined, the fees carry a most sentence of 77 years, the Justice Department stated.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite of the Justice Department’s felony division stated that O’Connor’s actions had been “flagrant and malicious.”

“He harassed, threatened, and extorted his victims, causing substantial emotional harm,” Polite, Jr. stated in a press release Tuesday.

“Like many criminal actors, O’Connor tried to stay anonymous by using a computer to hide behind stealth accounts and aliases from outside the United States. But this plea shows that our investigators and prosecutors will identify, locate, and bring to justice such criminals to ensure they face the consequences for their crimes.”

The assault, which befell in 2020, focused about 130 individuals, Twitter stated on the time. Hackers took management of the accounts to advertise a bitcoin rip-off, directing customers to ship the funds to a number of bitcoin addresses.

Twitter stated in 2020, shortly after the cyberattack befell, that it believes the hack was a “coordinated social engineering attack” on its staff — in different phrases, insiders on the firm had been tricked into handing over entry to inside techniques and instruments.

The attackers had been in a position to achieve entry to Twitter’s inside controls by compromising a small variety of staff, in line with a July 2020 Twitter weblog put up.

“O’Connor communicated with others regarding purchasing unauthorized access to a variety of Twitter accounts, including accounts associated with public figures around the world,” the Justice Department stated Wednesday.

“A number of Twitter accounts targeted by O’Connor were subsequently transferred away from their rightful owners. O’Connor agreed to purchase unauthorized access to one Twitter account for $10,000.”

O’Connor was additionally charged and pled responsible for his position in a SIM-swapping assault, which is when an attacker convinces a cell phone service to switch an individual’s telephone quantity to their system to bypass multi-factor authentication on on-line accounts.

The assault focused a number of high-profile corporations and executives within the cryptocurrency trade together with Binance, Tron founder Justin Sun, and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, and resulted within the theft of $794,000 in digital belongings, in line with the Justice Department. O’Connor agreed to forfeit the $794,000 to the courtroom and to pay restitution to the victims of his crimes, the DOJ stated.

O’Connor additionally compromised the account of “one of the most highly visible TikTok accounts” and threatened to launch delicate, private materials associated to the cyberattack sufferer to people who joined a specified server on the chat app Discord, the Justice Department stated.

U.S. Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey for the Northern District of California stated O’Connor “left an impressive trail of destruction” within the wake of his wave of criminality.

“This case serves as a warning that the reach of the law is long, and criminals anywhere who use computers to commit crimes may end up facing the consequences of their actions in places they did not anticipate,” Ramsey stated.

O’Connor was certainly one of 4 people charged over the scheme. In 2021, American teenager Graham Ivan Clark pleaded responsible to fraud fees.

Nima Fazeli of Orlando, Florida, and Mason Sheppard, of Bognor Regis within the U.Okay. have additionally been charged in relation to the hack.

O’Connor was arrested in July 2021 in Estepona, a resort city on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, by Spanish National Police on the request of U.S. authorities.