In this Wednesday Nov. 6, 2013, file photo, the Twitter logo appears on an updated phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Twitter says the hackers responsible for a recent high-profile breach used the phone to fool the social media company's employees into giving them access. The company revealed a few more details late Thursday, July 30, 2020 about the hack earlier this month, which it said targeted “a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack.” (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
By David Fischer
Updated 4:34 pm ET
A British man, a Florida man, and a Florida teen hacked the Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities, and technology moguls to scam people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin, authorities said Friday.
Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was arrested Friday in Tampa, where the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office will prosecute him as an adult. He faces 30 felony charges, according to a news release. Meanwhile, Mason Sheppard, 19, of Bognor Regis, UK, and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, were charged in California federal court.
In one of the most high-profile security breaches in recent years, hackers sent out bogus tweets on July 15 from the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.
The tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
"There is a false belief within the criminal hacker community that attacks like the Twitter hack can be perpetrated anonymously and without consequence," U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson for the Northern District of California said in a news release. "Today's charging announcement demonstrates that the elation of nefarious hacking into a secure environment for fun or profit will be short-lived."
Although the case against the teen was also investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren explained that his office is prosecuting Clark in Florida state court because Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in financial fraud cases such as this when appropriate.
"This defendant lives here in Tampa, he committed the crime here, and he'll be prosecuted here," Warren said.
Twitter previously said hackers used the phone to fool the social media company's employees into giving them access. It said hackers targeted "a small number of employees through a phone spear-phishing attack."
"This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems," the company tweeted.
After stealing employee credentials and getting into Twitter's systems, the hackers were able to target other employees who had access to account support tools, the company said.
The hackers targeted 130 accounts. They managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inboxes of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven. Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has said his inbox was among those accessed.
Spear-phishing is a more targeted version of phishing, an impersonation scam that uses email or other electronic communications to deceive recipients into handing over sensitive information.
Twitter said it would provide a more detailed report later "given the ongoing law enforcement investigation."
The company has previously said the incident was a "coordinated social engineering attack" that targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools. It didn't provide any more information about how the attack was carried out, but the details released so far suggest the hackers started by using the old-fashioned method of talking their way past security.
British cybersecurity analyst Graham Cluley said his guess was that a targeted Twitter employee or contractor received a message by phone 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," Clulely wrote Friday on his blog.
It's also possible the hackers pretended to call from the company's legitimate help line by spoofing the number, he said.
___
Associated Press Writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
Markets closed the day mixed, and well off their lows of the day following a market meltdown earlier in the session. The Nasdaq staged a comeback late in the day, even amid ongoing worries about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. Doug Flynn, certified financial planner and co-founder of Flynn Zito Capito, joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss the markets' close and what's driving the major indexes.
Two companies recently announced a new partnership aimed at addressing the growing demand to borrow against crypto - digital assets capital markets firm CrossTower is partnering with commercial bank, BankProv. The companies are launching a crypto lending platform that will allow Bitcoin miners to receive loans to invest in crypto mining equipment. The companies say the program also addresses the difficulty of breaking into crypto mining due to the high cost. CrossTower research analyst Martin Gaspar joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Next-gen social sports platform Break the Love recently raised $2.5 million in seed funding. Break the Love's platform and iOS app allows users to discover and book group-based tennis activities, to either learn, train, or compete. The new company has already gotten support from a few big names in the world of tennis, including the coach of Naomi Osaka, as well as the United States Tennis Association and the brand Wilson. Break the Love founder and CEO Trisha Goyal joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
As the Omicron variant continues to sweep across the country. The US Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments at the end of this week on whether or not the Biden administration can force private companies to vaccinate or test millions of their employees. In addition, the National Nurses United has spearheaded legal action to protect nurses and health care workers, patients, and the public while on the job. President of the National Nurses Union, Zenei Cortez, joined Cheddar to discuss more.
China's ongoing crackdown of its own entertainment industry has been raising eyebrows for once now. With the ruling Communist Party instructing media companies to boycott immoral and overly entertaining stars. But the country has gone even further. Now experts warn that this could lead to further issues such as gender-based violence. Professor at the Institute of Sociology at National Tsinghua University, Hsiu-Hua Shen, and Associate Professor of Politics at Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame Joshua Eisenman, joined Cheddar to discuss more.
Today marks one year since the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol. The Country watched as supporters of then-President Trump stormed what was assumed to be the most secure building in the country in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 Election. Several lawmakers, including the Vice President, could be seen ducking down as they feared for their lives. Democratic Michigan Representative Dan Kildee, joined Cheddar to discuss more.
Bed Bath & Beyond delivered disappointing fiscal third-quarter results for 2022. Shares initially dove more than 9% in premarket trading on the news but finished the day up nearly 8%. Bed Bath & Beyond has been a meme-stock target for online investors in the past -- so was meme-stock mania a factor in the recent stock movement for the company? Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of the subreddit WallStreetBets, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell for more, as his forum helped spark the meme stock phenomena. He also discussed some decentralized finance services and trends for the retail investor to watch for in 2022.
Digital medical care provider Pear Therapeutics rang the closing bell on the Nasdaq Friday and President and CEO Dr. Corey McCann, joined Cheddar to talk about how the company plans to grow the business of software-based therapeutics and how the first FDA authorized prescription digital therapeutics company will go about treating illnesses like insomnia and addiction. "These really are pieces of software. In many cases, they're apps and in the cases of our addiction products, these are based on something called cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT," he said. "These products change the patient's brain circuitry to help them be abstinent, to help them stay in treatment, and that's exactly what we see in randomized clinical trials and that's what we see in the real world." He also addressed the ongoing mental health crises brought on by the pandemic. **copy updated to remove IPO information as Pear Therapeutics went public in December**
James Tattersall, director of sales and marketing for Lake Nona Wave Hotel, talks about the hotel's initiatives to foster diversity and how these amenities champion inclusivity in the Orlando area.
