Florida Teen Charged in Mass Twitter Hack
A 17-year-old male was charged on Friday with 30 criminal counts for the massive hacking of the social network Twitter, which targeted personalities such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Elon Musk, the prosecutor’s office of Florida, Southeast USA reported on Friday.
Graham Ivan Clark “was the mastermind behind the recent Twitter attack,” the state attorney’s office said in a statement. The young man was arrested Friday morning in Tampa, on the west coast of Florida, where he resides.
According to the indictment, on July 15, Clark hacked into the Twitter profiles of prominent personalities and wrote messages asking users to deposit bitcoins in accounts associated with him. The young man managed to raise more than $100,000 in this cryptocurrency in a single day.
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The attack “was designed to steal money from Americans across the country, including here in Florida. This massive fraud was orchestrated right here in our backyard, and we will not accept it,” wrote State Attorney Andrew Warren.
On Thursday night, Twitter had provided new details about the spectacular attack.
“The attack consisted of a major and concerted attempt to trick certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to access our internal systems,” the social network said in a statement about the attack by hackers through the “phishing” mechanism, coordinated by phone.
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Among the hacked accounts were that of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the head of electric car maker Tesla, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates, founder of the computer giant Microsoft.
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