24-year-old hacker who hacked Musk, Gates, Biden’s Twitter accounts will go to jail and pay almost $800,000 in damages
Joseph James O’Connor, a 24-year-old British hacker who hacked into the Twitter accounts of Musk, Gates, and Biden, will be jailed for 5 years and pay $794,000 in damages.
This was reported by Dev.ua with reference to TechCrunch.
Joseph was sentenced by a federal court in New York. Prior to that, the Briton pleaded guilty to four counts of computer hacking, electronic fraud, cyberstalking and money laundering.
During the hearing, the judge suggested that O’Connor would likely serve only half of his sentence, as he had spent more than two years in pre-trial detention. The US Department of Justice requested at least seven years in prison.
The perpetrator, known online as “PlugWalkJoe,” was part of a group of hackers who hacked dozens of public figures’ Twitter accounts in 2020: Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Biden, as well as companies. Among the latter were Apple, Uber, and Binance.
O’Connor gained access to the infrastructure from Twitter employees. Then, another participant in the scheme, Graham Ivan Clarke under the nickname “Kirk”, “hijacked” profiles using internal “administrative” tools. On behalf of celebrities, they posted a fraudulent crypto scheme for those who wanted to make quick money.
O’Connor was detained in 2020 in Spain, but extradited to the United States only in April 2023. Graham Ivan Clarke was sentenced to three years in prison in July 2021.
