Graham Evan Clark, a teenage hacker who accused authorities of being the mastermind behind the infamous Twitter Bitcoin hack last year, pleaded guilty to 30 charges against him. As part of the deal, he agreed to serve three years in a juvenile facility. According to The New York Times And Tampa Bay Times, He was classified as a “juvenile offender” under Florida law, allowing him to avoid a minimum sentence of 10 years obtained as an adult.
Clark was arrested in July 2020, when he was still 17 years old, along with two other individuals, several weeks after the Twitter hack, which took multiple high-profile accounts. On July 15 last year, a number of following personalities and companies, including President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Uber, Apple Paul, Kanye West and Jeff Bezos, tweeted on the website that they were “giving back to the community” and Any bitcoin sent to a particular wallet will be doubled. The attackers managed to get 7 117,000 in bitcoin before the scheme was shut down.
After investigating the security breach, Twitter announced that the perpetrators were gaining access to the settlement account through social engineering. They apparently targeted Twitter employees with access to internal systems and tools, which they then took control of highly visible accounts. Not only did those tools give them the power to change account details and passwords, however – they could also give them access to the account owners’ DMs. In fact, Twitter confirmed that the attackers exported data to “eight of those accounts”. NYT Says Clark and his associates originally used the cassettes they had in Twitter’s internal system with a word or an unusual username, such as @dark, which they later sold to thousands of people on the OGUser forum. They changed half the strategy and instead ran a bitcoin scam.
According to a profile NYT Released after his arrest, Clark was already caught stealing bitcoins from a Seattle-based tech investor in 2019, but he was minor because he was not arrested. Clark turned over all the bitcoins in his possession after his arrest, and agreed not to use the computer without law enforcement approval or supervision as part of the deal. He could serve some of his sentence in a military-style boot camp, but could also spend up to 10 years in adult prison if he violated the terms of the contract.
