SLOPPY mistakes like using real photo identification helped federal agents catch the young hackers suspected of taking over several high-profile Twitter accounts last month.
Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was arrested Friday in Florida, while Nima Fazeli, 22, and English teen Mason Sheppard, 19, have also been charged in connection with the July 15 hack.
Investigators were able to link Sheppard and Fazeli to the variousDiscord accounts involved using their driver's license numbers, which the pair used to verify their cryptocurrency wallets.
Clark, who remains behind bars on $725,000 bail, knowingly "accessed a computer, computer system, computer network and electronic devices used by Twitter" months before the attack on May 3, a May 30court filing alleges.
The court records don't specify what happened on May 3, nor what the teen allegedly did between that date and the July 15 attack.
But on the day of the hack, a person with the handle Kirk#5270 allegedly posted on a Discord online chat forum that "that he/she could reset, swap and control any Twitter account at will, and would do so in exchange for bitcoin transfers," according to court docs.
A search warrant obtained by FBI investigators helped them access the Discord conversations between Kirk#5270 and an unidentified user named Rolex#0373, a handle later discovered to be associated with Fazeli.
Kirk#5270 (Clark) allegedly provided Rolex#0373 (Fazeli) with a bitcoin address detectives interpreted as Kirk#5270 asking for payment for access to the Twitter accounts, the filing says.
"For example, 'Kirk#5270' provided images of administrator-level access to Twitter accounts '@bumblebee,' '@sc,' '@vague,' and '@R9,' among many others.," the documents say.
"Based on the chat as a whole, it appears that 'ever so anxious#0001' began to find buyers for Twitter usernames."
Federal agents later determined that by the time the hack concluded, the bitcoin address associated with the attack processed roughly 415 transactions worth 12.86 bitcoin, or about $117,457 – the amount that was scammed from the victims.
Among those hacked were Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian-West and Kanye West, former President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and Microsoft boss Bill Gates.
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Several Twitter employees were targeted by a phone-based spear-phishing attack that gave the hackers credentials for the social media platform's internal systems and tools to enable their takeover.
The youngsters used stolen credentials to take over 130 accounts, and then they tweeted from 45 of them, according to Twitter.
The tweets falsely said the owners of the accounts would send double the number of bitcoins back to the handles.
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