Another Hacker Arrested for 2020 Twitter Hack and Massive Bitcoin Scam

A U.K. citizen has been arrested in the Spanish town of Estepona
over his alleged involvement in the July 2020 hack of Twitter,
resulting in the compromise of 130 high-profile accounts.

Joseph O’Connor, 22, has been charged^[1]
with intentionally accessing a computer without authorization and
obtaining information from a protected computer, as well as for
making extortive communications. The Spanish National Police made
the arrest pursuant to a U.S. warrant.

Besides his role in the Twitter hack, O’Connor is also charged
with computer intrusions related to takeovers of TikTok and
Snapchat user accounts and cyberstalking an unnamed juvenile
victim.

The great Twitter hack^[2]
of July 15, 2020, emerged as one of the biggest security lapses in
the social media platform’s history after O’Connor, along with
Mason Sheppard, Nima Fazeli, and Graham Ivan
Clark^[3], managed to gain access
to Twitter’s internal tools, abusing it to breach the accounts of
politicians, celebrities and companies for promoting a
cryptocurrency scam.

Graham Ivan Clark

The verified account scam raked in more than $100,000 in
bitcoin.

In an interview^[4]
with the New York Times last July, O’Connor, who identified himself
as “PlugWalkJoe”, said the Twitter credentials were obtained after
finding a way into the company’s internal Slack messaging channel,
where they had been posted.

“I don’t care,” O’Connor told The Times. “They can come arrest
me. I would laugh at them. I haven’t done anything.”

News of the arrest comes four months after Clark landed a three-year prison
sentence^[5] after he pled guilty to
fraud charges related to the incident.