Florida Teen Responsible for Hijacking High Profile Twitter Accounts Arrested, Faces 30 Felony Charges

US police authorities in a press conference on Friday said they had arrested the main accused and two other suspects responsible for a major Twitter hack earlier this month. The main accused is recognized as Graham Ivan Clark, 17 years teen who lives in Tampa, Florida. WFLA-TV, a Florida-based news agency that reported the incident for the first time, said that it was the main suspect (Clark), who was arrested for the Twitter attack. The arrest happened through a national collaboration IRS, Secret Service, the FBI, and the DOJ.

Andrew Warren, State Attorney of Hillsborough, charged Clark responsible for the 15th July Twitter incident. Clark was alleged for being the “mastermind” behind the attack in which the ‘suspects hijacked various high profile Twitter accounts.’ The hackers used these accounts to tweet about fake cryptocurrency scams. Here’s a list of hijacked accounts: Joe Biden, Barrack Obama, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Apple, Jeff Bezos, Uber, Michael Bloomberg, Kim Kardashian, and various others. According to officials, the hack resulted in getting $1,00,000 worth amount transferred to Clark’s account within a day.

Clark now faces 30 felony charges. These include: 

Communications Fraud  Organizing Fraud  Use of personal information for frauds  Accessing electronic device without legal authority

The charges specified above were declared through Livestream by the Hillsborough State Attorney. In the beginning, Warren didn’t specify whether Clark had other associates working for him. After the press conference, it came to public notice that two other suspects were working with Clark, identified as Mason Sheppard, 19, alias name “Chaewon,” and Nima Fazeli, 22, alias name “Rolex.” The suspect’s arrest happened just after Twitter had published its inquiry report related to th 15th July Twitter hack.

Some of the critical points in the report are mentioned below:

The incident happened on 20th July 2020  To gain access to Twitter employees’ accounts, hackers used phone bases social engineering systems. Hackers got access to the slack accounts and gained credentials (Yet to be confirmed)  Hackers escaped the 2 step authentication; the report doesn’t mention whether backend accounts or slack accounts.  After this, hackers used Twitter’s tech support tools to control the accounts.  Hackers breached 130 accounts  Hackers also attempted to sell some of the high profile Twitter profiles.