UK man pleads guilty to Twitter hack on Joe Biden, Elon Musk accounts

LONDON – A British man has pleaded guilty to helping organize a high-profile hack into the Twitter accounts of several celebrities and politicians including Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Kanye West.

Joseph O’Connor, 23, better known by his online alias “Plugwalk Joe,” entered a guilty plea in a New York court on Tuesday, according to the Justice Department. press release. He was deported from Spain last month.

O’Connor pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer hacking, committing computer intrusions, making extortionate and threatening communications, cyberstalking, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. The Justice Department said the combined charges carry a maximum sentence of 77 years.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Bullitt of the Justice Department’s criminal division said O’Connor’s activities were “egregious and malicious”.

“He harassed, threatened, and blackmailed his victims, causing significant moral harm,” Pollitt Jr. said in a statement Tuesday.

“Like many criminal actors, O’Connor has attempted anonymity by using a computer to hide behind secret accounts and aliases from outside the United States. But this petition shows that our investigators and prosecutors will identify these criminals, locate them, and bring them to justice to make sure they are They face the consequences of their crimes.”

Twitter said at the time that the attack, which took place in 2020, targeted about 130 people. Hackers took control of accounts to promote a bitcoin scam, directing users to send money to multiple bitcoin addresses.

Twitter said in 2020, shortly after the cyberattack occurred, that it believed the hack was a “coordinated social engineering attack” on its employees — in other words, company insiders were tricked into handing over access to internal systems and tools.

The attackers were able to access Twitter’s internal controls by compromising a small number of employees, according to Twitter in July 2020. blog post.

“O’Connor has communicated with others regarding the purchase of unauthorized access to a variety of Twitter accounts, including accounts associated with public figures around the world,” the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

“A number of Twitter accounts targeted by O’Connor were subsequently moved away from their rightful owners. O’Connor agreed to purchase unauthorized access to one Twitter account for $10,000.”

O’Connor was also charged and pleaded guilty to his role in a SIM swapping attack, which is when an attacker convinces a mobile operator to transfer someone’s phone number to their device to bypass multifactor authentication on online accounts.

The attack targeted several high-profile companies and executives in the cryptocurrency industry including Binance, Tron founder Justin Sun, and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, and resulted in the theft of $794,000 in digital assets, according to the Department of Justice. The Justice Department said O’Connor agreed to relinquish $794,000 to the court and pay compensation to the victims of his crimes.

The DOJ said O’Connor also abused an account of “one of TikTok’s most visible” accounts and threatened to post sensitive personal material related to the cyberattack victim to individuals who joined a specific server on the chat app Discord.

US Attorney Ismail J.

“This case serves as a warning that the reach of the law is long, and criminals anywhere who use computers to commit crimes may end up facing the consequences of their actions in places they did not expect,” Ramsey said.

O’Connor was one of four individuals accused of the scheme. In 2021, American teenager Graham Evan Clark pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

Neema Fazeli of Orlando, Florida, and Mason Sheppard of Bognor Regis, UK, have also been charged in connection with the hack.

O’Connor was The Spanish National Police arrested in July 2021 in Estepona, a resort town on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, at the request of US authorities.