US authorities arrested the three suspects behind the Twitter hack, including a teenager from Florida.
US authorities arrested the three suspects behind the Twitter hack, including a teenager from Florida.
While everyone thought the mastermind behind the Twitter hacking was high profile hackers, they were wrong when the teens were arrested.
Who was behind the attack?
A 17-year-od Graham Clark of Tampa, Florida, was charged 17 counts of communication fraud, ten counts of fraudulent use of personal information, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 (£76,340) or 30 or more victims, one count of organised fraud and one count of access to computer or electronic devices without authority.
Two other men accused of benefiting from the hack - Mason Sheppard, 19 of Bognor Regis, UK and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando - we're indicted separately in California federal court.
How did the hackers get into the system?
According to the company, hackers used social-engineering and spear-phishing phones to target Twitter employees. After stealing credentials from a small number of employees, hackers were able to get into the internal systems and focus on other employees who had access to account support tools.
British cybersecurity analyst Graham Cluley said he guessed that a targeted employee received a message asking them to call a number. “When the worker called the number they might have been taken to a convincing (but fake) helpdesk operator, who was then able to use social engineering techniques to trick the intended victim into handing over their credentials, ” wrote Cluley.
Following the hack, there were around 415 transfers into the suspect bitcoin address worth $117,457.58, per a federal indictment. The motive behind the attack was bitcoin theft and the sale of access to the accounts, rather than an intelligence effort by an external government.
The hackers targeted 130 accounts and managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inbox of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven.
High profile Twitter accounts including Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Wiz Khalifa were hacked on July 15. Tweets sent from the hijacked account promoted an advance free cryptocurrency spam, promising to double the price of Bitcoin currency sent to one specific wallet.
“We appreciate the swift actions of law enforcement in this investigation and will continue to cooperate as the case progresses. For our part, we are focused on being transparent and providing updates regularly, ” said Twitter in a statement.
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