A UK citizen was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in hacking the Twitter accounts of top political and business leaders in the United States.
Joseph James O'Connor, 24, will now serve time in federal prison nearly three years after one of the most visible real-time hacks in the recent history of Twitter.
Twitter Hacker Serving Five Years in Prison
Southern District of New York Attorney Damian Williams announced that Joseph James O'Connor, known as "PlugwalkJoe," was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for his involvement in a social media hijack on July 2020. He was also ordered to pay $794,000.
According to a press statement from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, O'Connor was extradited from Spain in April and pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering and stalking two victims, among others.
O'Connor was part of a hacking group that hijacked over 130 Twitter accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam, including those of Apple, Uber, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Kanye West.
US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff said O'Connor would likely serve about half of his sentence as he had already spent more than two years in pre-trial custody.
Rakoff said he considered O'Connor's relatively young age and autism in reaching the sentence, as the Twitter hacker asked to give him no more time behind bars than the 23 months he had already served before being sentenced, while prosecutors argued for seven years, Bloomberg reported.
During his sentencing hearing in Manhattan Friday, O'Connor told Rakoff, "I am ashamed to be here. I'm sorry to all the victims of my crimes. I'm here because I did stupid and shameful things. I will never break the law again. I want to live a life with meaning, not the idiotic, empty, hermit life I was living."
TechCrunch reported that O'Connor was part of a group that broke into dozens of high-profile Twitter accounts to spread scams related to cryptocurrency in July 2020. Through his phone-based social engineering techniques, O'Connor tricked employees from Twitter into granting the group of hackers access to the platform's network.
The alleged mastermind of the hacking group, Graham Ivan Clark, reportedly used the access to the network of Twitter and abused an internal admin tool to hack and reassign user accounts. As a response, Twitter temporarily blocked users from posting to the site to fix and take action against the intrusion.
A million users watched in real-time as they watched their timelines flooded with cryptocurrency scams from some recognizable celebrities, politicians, and business leaders, netting about $120,000. Clark, a Florida teen, was already sentenced to three years in juvenile prison in July 2021.
Numerous Online Schemes
Prosecutors argued that Joseph James O'Connor used his sophisticated technological abilities for malicious purposes, such as hacking accounts on Twitter, conducting a complex SIM swap attack to obtain large amounts of cryptocurrency, conducting computer intrusions to take over social media accounts, and cyberstalking two victims, in which one of them was a minor.
Bloomberg reported that O'Connor admitted to "swatting" a 16-year-old girl in June and July 2020, when he called local police and claimed she was planning to shoot people at what he thought was her address.
Similar messages were also sent to a high school, a restaurant, and a sheriff's department. He then called multiple members of the victim's family, threatening to kill them.
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