Transparency and Integrity

7/31/2020

Twitter Hack : 17-Year Old Charged For Allegedly Masterminding Activity.


A 17-Year Old was on Friday charged in Florida  for allegedly hijacking  accounts of celebrities in  an attempt to defraud them of more than $100,000 crypto currency.

Andrew Warren, an attorney from Hillsborough, revealed that the teenager who was arrested in Tampa and thereafter slammed 30 counts charge bothering around felony.
Also charged by the US Attorney's office in San Francisco are; Mason and Nima Fazeli. The third person charged wasn't revealed to the public because he is said to be a minor.

According to a recent report by  ChannelsTV, the attack on Twitter involved a combination of "technical breaches and social engineering" that enables hackers high jack accounts of politicians, celebrities, and music artists. They hacked Twitter accounts, created a scam Bitcoin account, and tweeted about wanting to double Bitcoin which had been deposited earlier.

An agent with the Internal Revenue Service, Kelly Jackson who specializes in criminal investigation said,

"This case serves as a example of how following the money, international collaboration, and public private partnerships can work to successfully take down a perceived anonymous criminal enterprise.

Andrew Warren in a press release said,

" These crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they're not the victims here.
This 'Bit-con' was designed to steal money from regular Americans all over the country."

Warren further stressed that over a hundred and thirty accounts were affected just by the attack from Joe Biden to Elon Musk as hackers tweeted and duped many into sending Bitcoin to accounts associated with Clark.

Some other official accounts that were affected were Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Barrack Obama.

Twitter had earlier claimed that the attack happened as a result of a " Phone Spear Phishing " which gave the attackers control of many famous people like the former president of the United States Barrack Obama, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. The attackers also duped people into sending Bitcoin.

Twitter support in issuing a statement on the incident which occurred on July 15, realizing how much people were troubled by the recent  revelation and the security of the platform which is common for driving political conversations and public analysis said,

"Fake tweets were sent from at least 45 accounts, The hackers accessed private messages of 36 and downloaded data from seven.

" Hackers also targeted a small number of employees through a 'phone spear phishing attack'.
This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems."

"We have significantly limited access to our internal tools and systems and we are taking steps to tighten security."

Yet another method used by attackers was scamming people by phone. According to a report from a company In July, Hackers who had successfully accessed quite of number of Twitter accounts of high profile persons deceived  employees into revealing their credentials.

Another security specialist John from the Denim group John Dickson speaking said,
" This is like the original hackers from the 1980s and 1990s. They were good at conning people and getting them to give out their credentials."

He revealed that, the latest finding on hackers does not translate to a sophisticated attack from a nation-state. He stressed that targets could have been found through LinkedIn and Google. He said,

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