23-year-old Brit linked to 2020 Twitter SIM-swap attack pleads guilty
A 23-year-old British citizen has confessed to"multiple schemes" involving computer crimes, including playing a part in the July 2020 Twitter attack that saw the accounts of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, and former President Barack Obama hijacked by an unidentified crew.
Joseph James O'Connor, known by the online alias PlugwalkJoe, was extradited from Spain last month and pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including computer crimes, cyberstalking, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud when he appeared in a New York court yesterday, the Feds say.The 2020 Twitter attack happened when blue ticks still meant"verified account" and was accomplished using social engineering just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to gain traction.
Infosec Twitterati took to the platform this morning to note that the case exposed Twitter's poor security profile at the time. The company has since tightened its protocols, which among other things now includes havingread a message posted to Bill Gates's Twitter account at the time – although it is not known if O'Connor was connected to this specific message."I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000." Elon Musk was also purported by the attackers] and would also give a nifty $2k to anyone who sent $1k in BTC, making everyone pity the suckers that fell for the misspelled scam.
According to the court documents, O'Connor and his co-conspirators used social engineering techniques to transfer control of highly desirable Twitter accounts from their rightful owners to"various unauthorized users." Feds explained that sometimes the co-conspirators took control themselves and used the accounts to defraud other Twitter users and in"other instances, the co-conspirators sold access to Twitter accounts to others.
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