The Twitter hacker was sentenced to 5 years in prison for hacking into the accounts of Bill Gates, Musk and other celebrities

CTOnews.com, June 26 (Xinhua) A British man involved in a massive hacking attack on Twitter in 2020 was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $794000 in federal court in New York on Friday, according to the U.S. Justice Department. (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 5.717 million yuan), which is the amount he illegally obtained in online fraud.

The man, Joseph O'Connor, 24, pleaded guilty to four counts of computer hacking, telecom fraud and Internet tracking in May. He was one of several suspects in the Twitter hacking attack in 2020, when more than 130 Twitter accounts were hijacked, including US President Joe Biden, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and politicians and stars such as celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.

In order to carry out the fraud, hackers carried out so-called "phone spear phishing attacks" on some Twitter employees, making them think they were talking to colleagues, thus obtaining Twitter's internal tools. Hackers then used internal Twitter tools to take over the accounts and posted fake tweets (pictured below) to induce fans to pay for a bitcoin wallet and promised to double the money back to them.

At the request of the US authorities, O'Connor was arrested in Spain in July and extradited to the United States from Spain in April this year. Before him, three other people in connection with the case were arrested in 2020, one of whom was sentenced to three years in prison by a United States court in March 2021.

Assistant US Attorney General Kenneth Pollitt Jr. called O'Connor 's actions "blatant and vicious" and said he had "harassed, threatened and extorted victims and caused serious emotional harm". The Justice Department also revealed that O'Connor pleaded guilty to a number of other hacking crimes, including hacking into a well-known Douyin account and stalking a minor.