A 23-year-old British man has confessed to being guilty of the large-scale hack into Twitter’s systems in 2020. The US Department of Justice reported this on Tuesday, according to international news agencies. The hack took over a total of 130 accounts, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Gates. The Twitter profile of PVV leader Geert Wilders was also inaccessible for days.
The Briton, Joseph James O’Connor, was arrested in 2021 and extradited to the United States last April. He blackmailed, threatened and stalked victims online. O’Connor has left “an impressive trail of destruction,” prosecutors said. He also used hacked Twitter accounts to request digital currency, prompting Twitter to block some verified accounts for several hours. Together with accomplices, O’Connor stole at least $794.00 in cryptocurrency. He must pay compensation of the same amount and risks a prison sentence of up to 70 years.
The hack into Twitter’s system in 2020 allowed O’Connor and other unauthorized persons to easily take over accounts of famous people. Questionable messages came from the accounts of reality star Kim Kardashian to Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who did not own Twitter at the time). An anonymous American hacker who occupied Geert Wilders’ profile later confessed to, among others NOS that he did it for fun. He changed the profile picture of the account to a racist caricature and the header to a Moroccan flag.
Also read this analysis from 2020: The hack of Twitter shows: the social network is that easy to manipulate