Florida youth arrested for “hacking” Obama, Gates and Musk accounts

Miami – A 17-year-old boy from Tampa (West Florida) was arrested this Friday as the alleged perpetrator of the massive “hacking” of Twitter, including those of former President Barack Obama and billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk, as part of a scam offering payments in the virtual currency Bitcoin.

Graham Clark was detained this Friday in his city apartment and, as Hillsborough County District Attorney Andrew Warren noted in a video on Twitter, this teenager was “the thinking mind that carried out the attack.”

Warren explained that the teenager, who is already in prison, has been charged with a total of 30 crimes including organized fraud, wire fraud, identity theft and electronic piracy, crimes that were organized “in our own backyard. “

In addition to those of Obama, Gates and Musk, the accounts of the virtual Democratic candidate for the White House, Joe Biden, were also hacked; Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, artist Kanye West, and Uber and Apple companies.

“This individual’s crimes were perpetrated using the names of famous people and celebrities, but they are not the primary victims. This fraud was designed to steal money from thousands of Americans across the country,” added the prosecutor.

The “hackers” published similar messages on July 15 that offered to double the money that users entered in Bitcoin to a virtual cryptocurrency wallet.

“I am giving back to the community! All the Bitcoin entered to the following address will be returned in duplicate! If you send $ 1,000, I will return you $ 2,000. I will only do it for 30 minutes,” stated a message on Joseph Biden’s account.

A similar message on Jeff Bezos’s account promised to deliver $ 50 million, while Uber promised 100.

“Due to COVID-19, we are returning $ 10 million in Bitcoin. All payments sent to our address will be returned doubled,” noted the message on the account of the shared transport company.

Twitter recognized the breach in its security system and maintains an internal investigation into it. This Thursday revealed in a statement that the incident occurred when attacking company employees through “phishing”. This technique captures private data by falsifying pages that users know, which are duplicated, and request that the confidential data that they want to obtain be entered into it.

Warren also explained that Clark had access to the accounts of these personalities by committing a Twitter worker, after which he sold access to those accounts that requested money in the form of Bitcoin promising that he would donate twice as much as was entered.

The “hacking” was a show of force from the hackers and its consequences could have been greater given the importance of the affected accounts if their authors had had other objectives than asking for money for Bitcoin.

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