A Florida Teen Just Got Arrested for Twitter's Huge Hack (zdnet.com) 102
In a press conference on Friday, US authorities announced they arrested the main suspect behind this month's major Twitter hack. From a report: The suspected hacker was identified as Graham Ivan Clark, a 17-year-old teen from Hillsborough County, Florida. According to Florida news outlet WFLA-TV, which first reported on the arrest, Clark was arrested earlier this morning, following a nationwide collaboration between the FBI, the IRS, the DOJ, and the Secret Service. Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren filed charges against Clark for being the "mastermind" behind the July 15 Twitter incident, when the teen is believed to have gained access to Twitter's backend, took over several high-profile accounts, and tweeted on their behalf to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The list of hacked accounts includes big names like Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Michael Bloomberg, and others. Further reading: Twitter Says High-Profile Hack Was the Result of a Phishing Attack.
Crypto scam? What a dummy (Score:1)
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Re:Crypto scam? What a dummy (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I figured it was an amateur by the fact that they used a comparatively low-paying crypto scam. They could have bought SPY puts and then temporarily crashed the US economy by posting fake policy tweets from Trump, followed by "confirmation" from other officials (huge surprise increases in interest rates, war, martial law, mass deportations of all H1-B workers, etc). Or higher payoff (but somewhat less difficult to camouflage) puts in specific stocks, alongside tweets to crash them (X company's main factory just burned down, Y company's CEO and CFO indicted for mass accounting fraud, etc).
They could easily pull off thousand-to-one bets, maybe tens-of-thousands-to-one.
Obviously, selling your backdoor or compromised information in DMs to nation-states would be another high paying possibility. Embarrassing information in DMs of millions of high-profile people could be a well-paying blackmail tool, too.
Instead, they needed, what, $100k-ish in a lame crypto scam? Hope that was worth the jail time...
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Trump's doing fine crashing the economy all on his own, thank you very much, and he doesn't need some Florida teen's help. Although, if I was this Florida teen, I'd be calling the White House looking for a pardon and a job as Trump's campaign manager. You have to think there would be a place for him on the team.
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The recession started in February, well before the beginning of the lockdown.
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Oh it started in February? Are we living in the same country? Unemployment peaked at an all-time low in February:
https://www.ncsl.org/research/... [ncsl.org]
First you had democrats yelling at Trump for keeping things open for so long, and now you have Democrats yelling at Trump for closing things down and killing the economy. Makes sense.
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Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is not how recessions are measured. The definition of a recession is two quarters of contraction in GDP. February 2020 was the seventh consecutive month with contraction in manufacturing activity and real GDP growth (over inflation) was in already in negative numbers. Unemployment tends to be a lagging indicator, and indeed it went from
Maybe you forgot Trum
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They could easily pull off thousand-to-one bets, maybe tens-of-thousands-to-one.
And be in jail even faster. You can't trade real securities anonymously, and any unlikely win, especially in suspicious circumstances, is immediately investigated. Of course, Bitcoin isn't anonymous either, unless you do a better job than this guy obviously did, but at least the approach has some sort of rationale.
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Nobody said anything about "trading securities anonymously". But every single day there's a flood of people buying SPY puts. You'd be lost in the noise. Not "anonymous", just "one of countless entities out there buying SPY puts" (a common hedge against market downturns).
Specific stocks however have less noise to get lost in. Hence the comment about higher risk.
That's a nice fantasy world that I wish were actually true.
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Nobody said anything about "trading securities anonymously". But every single day there's a flood of people buying SPY puts. You'd be lost in the noise.
If you are new to trading options, and get a multi-million dollar high odds payoff, the SEC would notice They're really good at that sort of thing, because it's what insider trading looks like. You'd pop right out of the statistical noise, and they look at the exceptions. If there was some newsworthy event that caused the market move, they'd be looking at you right away in connection with it. OTOH, if you could somehow sell the info to Goldman Sacs, they could made the same trade and get away with it.
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Or bought SPY calls and posted from Bill Gates account a vaccine has been found and will be available for mass vaccination in 15 days.
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He should probably get a pardon and a Congressional Medal of Freedom for the public service of letting people know they should not trust tweets blindly.
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followed by "confirmation" from other officials
There a difference between the usual running off at the mouth and someone (state or local officials) following up "OMG, he's actually doing it this time." You'd have to pick someone who hasn't already cried wolf too many times. That rules out a number of federal legislators.
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His middle name is Ivan.
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We did it reddit!.. ahem, Slashdot.
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"How many anonymous intelligence agency sources can link him to Russians?"
His middle name is Ivan.
Before the Internet and Bitcoin came along, the bad guy's middle name was always Dwayne. Now it's Ivan.
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The Steele Dossier says he works for Trump.
RISC is good (Score:4, Funny)
As he was led away by the Secret Service, Clark was seen wearing mismatched neon-colored cloths with animal print patches and was heard yelling "Hack the planet!"
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I was just about to comment that this whole plot was taken from a movie based on screen savers from 20 years ago.
Only 17? (Score:2)
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Unfortunately they are still able to become Masters of the Universe.
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Some people still don't realise that "Brains of a Wombat" is not a superpower.
I am vengeance.
I am the night.
I
am
woBAT-MAN!
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Not entirely. [nbcnews.com]
"This defendant lives here in Tampa, he committed the crime here, and he'll be prosecuted here," Warren said. Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in financial fraud cases.
Hold the phone... His Mom is on record saying, "I believe he didn’t do it. I’ve spoken to him every day,” she said. “I’m devastated.”
Re:Only 17? (Score:5, Funny)
I've always hoped that if I'm ever arrested for some nefarious crime, my mom would buck the trend and tell the press "I always knew he'd pull some stupid crap like this."
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No. The government will just hire him for "cyber security"
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I mean, reform and restitution I hope will be the answer.
You seem unfamiliar with the US justice system.
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He did us a public service by showing us how vulnerable twitter is in an election year. He should probably get a medal.
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And my mom would say "That's odd, I always felt his downfall would have been extortion..."
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I've always hoped that if I'm ever arrested for some nefarious crime, my mom would buck the trend and tell the press "I always knew he'd pull some stupid crap like this."
My favorite (so to speak) along those lines was Gary Ridgway [wikipedia.org], AKA the Green River Killer. When he got arrested, many of his neighbors referred to him as "really stange and creepy". The guys he worked with at the Kenworth plant said "yup, we're not surprised at all". They'd even privately given him the nickname "Green River".
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If I was stupid enough to try a crime like this, the first thing I would do is install a backdoor in that computer and access it wirelessly from a cheapy second hand notebook. When they come to take the computers away and they will, computers are really, really good and organised masses of network data to track anything down. They would have the proof I was hacked and have to declare it as such, because of the backdoor software they found on the system and the trail of actions it left behind. Leaving them t
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"He was playing games the whole time, I could him saying how close he was to beating the high score!"
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He was shooting for a high score, wasn't he?
Master criminal that he imagined himself to be, with the help of the "untraceable" bitcoin, undoubtedly. There was no way he was going to get away with it, so he either wanted to get caught or had deluded himself into believing it was a sound plan... likely the latter.
Good judgement is often the last quality of character to develop in us. Just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should do a thing.
Re:Only 17? (Score:5, Insightful)
So Twitter got pwned by a script kiddie?
Yes, they were. Nicely illustrates how abysmally bad corporate IT often is these days.
he's rich (Score:5, Interesting)
Officials said the hack resulted in more than $100,000 being sent to Bitcoin "accounts associated with Clark" in one single day.
Making money off hacking is ten times harder than hacking in the first place, because it gives police a way to track.
double his sentence! (Score:2)
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Officials said the hack resulted in more than $100,000 being sent to Bitcoin "accounts associated with Clark" in one single day.
Making money off hacking is ten times harder than hacking in the first place, because it gives police a way to track.
Ransomware seem to work these days. If done right. All other options are basically worse than burger-flipping.
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You're right, but I think most ransomware is started from places without extradition treaties to the US. I could be wrong.
Probably. The point is ransomware is basically the only really worthwhile black-hat activity these days. Will probably remain so, because many, many corporations think they can go cheap on IT security. Unless and until this is generally classified as the results of gross negligence (with CEO, CTO and CISO becoming personally liable), this will not change.
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Naivete is involved. "They can't track me with bitcoin! Now where is there a public bitcoin trading site I can use... Oh, over here on the dimly-lit net!"
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Naivete is involved. "They can't track me with bitcoin!
That's true, a lot of people get really confused about that.
USA! USA! (Score:2)
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Exactly, but he did have a crime partner in Western Europe:
Federal authorities also announced that Mason Sheppard, of Bognor Regis in the United Kingdom, was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and the intentional access of a protected computer.
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More like a tectonic saucer for a doll's house.
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Well, he got caught pretty fast. He may be somewhat smart on absolute terms, but relatively, he obviously is a Dunning-Kruger far left case.
Who? (Score:1)
> ... Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Michael Bloomberg, ...
So, no one that really matters.
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I think he tried, but he found no victims who believed that Trump could double their investments.
The kid made a very big mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
A U.S. resident can't compromise the Twitter accounts of major political figures, including the Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency, and get away with a Bitcoin scam. Scamming the proletariat is one thing (as many robocallers and spammers can attest), but when you embarrass the rich and powerful then they will find you.
This is especially true in an election year, when everyone is hypersensitive about foreign political interference. What if this was a test run for some state-sponsored entity, as a prelude to sending out damaging tweets right before the election? The authorities had to find who did it.
The fact that they've already released his name means he's going to be charged as an adult. And with all the felony charges they are piling on, he's going to serve some time. An example is going to be made of him.
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Obama disagrees that you need to be white.
It's just about being rich and powerful.
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Half white with a politically connected mother who worked for the deep state will do too.
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Half white with a politically connected mother who worked for the deep state will do too.
Wait, what?!? Obama's mother was politically connected to the US intelligence community? Are you off your meds or something? Yea, ok, I'm sure she was freelancing for the agency between working shifts making beds...
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Obama's mom was a foreign relations thinktank employee. She met his dad - the scion of a rich African family while they were at Grad school at University of Hawaii. He grew up in Who told you she was a maid? He grew up in a life of privilege in Indonesia with his rich businessman Indonesian stepfather.
His dads family was descended from rich African elites who sold slaves. his moms family is descended from rich American elite how owned slaves.
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A boer whore working for the deep state? Hahaha
Re:The kid made a very big mistake (Score:4)
Well, this stupid kid is a stupid kid. What do you expect? Of course, I would expect security that a stupid kid cannot break at something like Twitter, but apparently that is too much to ask.
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The fact that they've already released his name
Graham IVAN Clark. It's the Russians!
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Apparently some bloke from Bognor Regis in the UK has been arrested too: https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
I expect there will be an extradition fight over that one.
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Who gets a job as a journalist? English majors who partied their way through college.
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For stealing bitcoins? Or are crimes okay in your book if they target the mentally ill?
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Could have done so much more (Score:5, Interesting)
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Or he could've shut up, because his access was worth millions in the right hands. He had access to major accounts, he could've done plenty of havoc including selling DMs to other individual
So a semi-competent can hack Twitter? (Score:2)
Can we please get security that alt least requires somebody with an engineering education in the field and some years of experience to break it? I would say for this case, they should arrest the CEO, CTO and CISO of Twitter and this stupid kid should be set free and thanked publicly for exposing utter and complete incompetence at Twitter.
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It does require completely inadequate security in the system the customer service person is using though. Some changes need 4 eyes. Banks have that down, but it is their money they are protecting, after all.
Graham Ivan Clark (Score:2)
Three names. A potential serial killer has been stopped in the nick of time.
Re:He must love Trump.... (Score:4, Funny)
Trump's account has additional protections on it.
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>> Trump's account has additional protections on it.
An IQ test perhaps? (Any guesses on the range needed?)
Hilarious (Score:2)
It's hilarious that he thought he could get away with this.
Yes, sometimes people do get away with stuff like this but on the whole you're much, much more likely to get caught.
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Seventeen-year-old guys are not exactly known for thinking things through.
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Hes 17. He get Juvi and his record is sealed after 1 year. In the meantime if he managed to hold on to at least some of the crypto he can just wait out his jail sentence , come out and cash out. BTC would probably be worth more when he comes out. Even if the govt goes after him for restitution, he still only needs to pay back the USD so maybe half of the BTC after appreciation. He still gets to keep the rest.
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He used his own driver's license to verify his bitcoin wallet....I wouldn't count on this clodhopper keeping much of anything for long.
Mmm, redundancy... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Graham Ivan Clark, a 17-year-old teen"
What, as opposed to a 17-year-old in his thirties?
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I know a lot of 17 year olds who are well past their thirties. The age on the face doesn't automatically impart maturity or wisdom.
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And I work with a 30 year old who has the maturity of a 17 year old.
She sucks up to the boss, acting like a school girl, and is a bitch to anyone else who isn't in her clique.
For sure, age doesn't impart maturity,
Putin (Score:2)
Ever wondered if this teenager happened to be in a small Russian town how the media would be running with a story about Russian hacking and how Putin controls everything.
Yet noone is blaming Trump for this hack