Three arrests have been made in the recent Twitter hack that led to accounts such as Elon Musk, Apple, and Kanye West posting bitcoin scams.
A huge cyber-security scandal hit Twitter recently when the accounts of famous individuals such as Elon Musk and Barack Obama suddenly started posting Bitcoin scam messages to their followers. Over £93,000 of bitcoin was stolen from people who fell for the scam, which offered to double any bitcoin sent to a certain wallet, but the damage could have been far worse as cryptocurrency exchange CoinBase prevented thousands of pounds from being transferred once the scam was known.
The initial information about the breach indicated that it was an inside job, with a rogue employee using the company's internal tools to gain access to the famous accounts. The support tool was used to reset the passwords on dozens of high-profile verified accounts, which were them used to post the scam message.
Twitter has now confirmed that outside attackers targeted employees using a phone "spear phishing" attack in which the person impersonates someone else in an attempt to get the employee to reveal confidential information. They managed to trick one employee into giving the attacker access to the internal Twitter tools, which let them reset account passwords. Twitter also confirmed that the DM inboxes of 36 accounts hit were accessed, and that 7 had their full Twitter data downloaded.
Authorities have now managed to trace three individuals involved in the hack: 19 year old Mason Sheppard in the UK, 22 year old Nima Fazeli in Orlando in the US, and an unnamed 17 year old in Tampa in the US. Over 30 individual charges have been made against the 17 year old alone.
