The World: 17 year old arrested as mastermind of Twitter hack in Florida

Last updated on September 11th, 2021 at 02:36 pm

A Florida teen was once recognized Friday as the mastermind of a scheme before this month that commandeered Twitter money owed of outstanding politicians, celebrities and science moguls and scammed human beings around the globe out of greater than $100,000 in Bitcoin. Two different guys have been additionally charged in the case.

Graham Ivan Clark, 17, used to be arrested Friday in Tampa, where the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office will prosecute him as an adult. He faces 30 criminal charges, in accordance to a information release.

Two guys accused of benefiting from the hack — Mason Sheppard, 19, of Bognor Regis, UK, and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando — were charged one at a time in California federal court.

In one of the most high-profile protection breaches in latest years, bogus tweets have been despatched out on July 15 from the debts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires which includes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, have been also hacked.

The tweets provided to ship $2,000 for each and every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address. The hack alarmed protection professionals because of the grave attainable of such an intrusion for developing geopolitical mayhem with disinformation.

Court papers in the California instances say Fazeli and Sheppard brokered the sale of Twitter accounts stolen through a hacker who identified himself as “Kirk” and stated he may want to “reset, swap and manage any Twitter account at will” in exchange for cybercurrency payments, claiming to be a Twitter employee.

The documents do now not specify Kirk’s real identification but say he is a teen being prosecuted in the Tampa area.

(Gulftoday)