Joseph O’Connor is a 24-year-old Briton who in July 2020 became famous for taking over Twitter accounts belonging to many extremely influential people. Its victims were not only well-known politicians, such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama and stars (e.g. Kanye West), but also personalities of the technological world, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. O’Connor also took over the accounts of huge American companies – including Apple and Uber. And all this to use them in phishing campaigns.
He hacked into the world’s most valuable accounts. All for phishing
The hacker used extremely popular accounts to promote phishing posts. Impersonating Musk, Obama or Biden, he encouraged users to make false investments in cryptocurrencies (“If you send me $1,000, I’ll send you back $2,000 in 30 minutes,” he wrote in the posts). In total, his tweets were seen by 350 million users around the world, and thousands were fooled and sent money. As he later admitted, he did not need outstanding hacking skills for this. He reached out to a small number of Twitter employees, and – using social engineering tricks – convinced them to grant access to Twitter’s administrative tools. In this way, he managed to take control of key accounts.
How the services found Joseph O’Connor in Spain, where he was hiding. He was arrested, and earlier this year – on the basis of an extradition order – the Spaniards handed over the criminal to the Americans. He spent the following months in custody in New York. In the meantime, investigators found and interviewed three other men with whom the 24-year-old may have been collaborating. The hacker’s trial took place on Friday, and O’Connor pleaded guilty to all charges – including conspiring to commit cyber-intrusions, electronic fraud and money laundering.
According to US law – after adding up all the charges – the hacker was facing up to 77 years in prison. The court called his frauds “flagrant and malicious” and stated that he “harassed, threatened and coerced his victims, causing significant emotional damage” – However, it agreed to a significant reduction of the sentence, because the man pleaded guilty, expressed remorse, apologized to the victims and specified his actions as “foolish and pointless”. Eventually, he was sentenced to 7 years in prison (he had already served part of the sentence while waiting for the trial in custody). He must also pay the victims 794,000. compensation dollars.
Source: Gazeta
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