FBI in association with some state law enforcement agencies have arrested Graham Ivan Clark from Tampa, Florida in relation to the hack that took place on Twitter on July 15th, 2020 targeting accounts of renowned celebrities, politicians and technology company owners.
Clark has admitted the crime on Tuesday over Zoom’s virtual conference and is ready to face charges for misusing personal information of over 130 Twitter users.
Nima Fazeli from Orlando and Mason Sheppard from Bognor Regis, UK were also charged separately by a California court on this note highlighting Ivan Clark as the ringleader of the entire digital fraud.
As per the details available with Cybersecurity Insiders, Ivan and his team of hackers infiltrated some employee accounts of Twitter through social engineering attacks and then took control of some twitter accounts including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Kanya West- to name a few.
They then posted messages from those hacked accounts asking their followers to deposit $2k money that will be used later to treat COVID 19 victims. Thus, they received funds from various twitter users around the world, thinking the account owner posted the message in genuine.
FBI has confirmed that the hackers received funds worth $180,000 in Bitcoins that were then transferred to the BTC wallet address related to Coinbase owned by Fazeli and Sheppard.
As the BTC accounts maintained by Coinbase were verified with the driver’s license of the two respective users (i.e. Fazeli and Sheppard) the law enforcement personnel tracked them down by analyzing the transactions taking place on a blockchain and zeroing down on the physical addresses of the criminals.
Note- Twitter on Tuesday confirmed that it has received a complaint from FTC that it has violated the data privacy policies by using personal data of its users to serve ads that were otherwise intended for security. If this case sees the end, then the social media giant can land up in paying an amount ranging between $150 million to $250 million as a penalty.
