What happened?
On 31st july Friday, US prosecutors said they have charged three people, two US citizens and one from Britain for the hijacking of Twitter accounts and using them to extract money out of their followers. The US attorney’s office in california said 3 people were charged for this hijack yet.
Who are were people involved?
According to the statement of US attorney office of California:
- Nima Fazeli, 22 years, of florida.
- Mason Sheppard also known as Chaewon, 19 years, of Britain.
- A 17 year old teenager from florida whose details were not revealed. This teenager was charged separately and was accused of masterminding the massive hijack of high-profile Twitter users.
How and what type of attack was done to accomplish this hack?
According to the federal prosecutors, the attack done on twitter accounts involved mixing and matching of “technical breaches and social engineering”, which allowed the hackers to hijack accounts of high profile users. This attack was done in order to execute a bitcoin scam from the trusted account with huge following. Hence high profile Twitter accounts were chosen to do the job.
Twitter on the other hand said that this hijacking was made possible due to a “phone spear phishing” attack enabling the hijackers to have access to the back hand of twitter.
What charges are being pressed against the accused?
The accused have been charged with hacking Twitter accounts, creating a scam bitcoin account, publishing imposter tweets from the hijacked account to scam the people using Twitter.
