Hacker Who Took Over Biden, Elon Musk Twitter Accounts Pleads Guilty

A UK citizen accused of hacking Twitter accounts as a part of a Bitcoin scheme has pleaded responsible to his function in cyber stalking and laptop hacking that focused quite a few high-profile social media accounts, together with the July 2020 Twitter hack.

Joseph James O’Connor, a.ok.a. PlugwalkJoe, 23, was extradited to the US from Spain final month, the place he awaited trial for harassing, threatening, and extorting his victims.

According to Gizmodo, the primary time O’Connor was arrested was in 2021 for making an attempt to take management of 130 Twitter accounts, together with — US President Joe Biden, American socialite & mannequin Kim Kardashian, and Tesla & Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

O’Connor, in July 2020, wrote on Biden’s account, “All Bitcoin despatched to the handle under shall be despatched again double! If you ship $1,000, I’ll ship again $2,000. Only doing this for half-hour. Enjoy!”

Twitter then responded at the moment by deactivating all verified accounts and disabling the tweet characteristic in an try to focus on the hackers.

“We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” Twitter’s assist group wrote in July 2020.

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), an FBI investigation discovered that O’Connor and his co-conspirators have been capable of switch management of some Twitter accounts to unauthorised customers for a payment.

Moreover, the investigation uncovered that in sure cases, the group exploited the management that they had over sure Twitter accounts for private acquire, and engaged in fraudulent actions that impacted different customers of the platform.

As a part of this, it was found that O’Connor had made an settlement to buy entry to a particular account for a sum of $10,000.

“Like many prison actors, O’Connor tried to remain nameless by utilizing a pc to cover behind stealth accounts and aliases from exterior the US. But this plea exhibits that our investigators and prosecutors will determine, find, and produce to justice such criminals to make sure they face the implications for his or her crimes,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A Polite, Jr of the DOJ’s Criminal Division said in a statement.

As part of his guilty plea, O’Connor has agreed to pay restitution to all of the victims and forfeit just over $7,94,000. His sentencing is scheduled for June 23 in a district court in New York.

(This story has not been edited by News18 employees and is printed from a syndicated news company feed)