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The Twitter app on a smartphone (symbol image)
Photo: Matt Rourke / dpa
Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West and many more: last July, hackers hijacked the Twitter accounts of various celebrities.
Graham Ivan C., who is seen as the "mastermind" of the cyber attack, has now made a deal with the judicial authorities.
The 18-year-old confessed Tuesday in Florida and accepted three years of juvenile detention.
He was arrested in his apartment just a few days after the hack, which allegedly stole Bitcoins, among other things, and was charged with organized fraud on 30 counts.
Through his cooperation with the public prosecutor, Graham Ivan C. avoids a possible adult conviction, which could have resulted in a much longer prison term.
At the time of the hack, the main suspect in the trial was only 17 years old.
The Twitter accounts of numerous celebrities were taken over during the cyber attack.
Company accounts, such as those from Apple, were also hacked.
Via the accounts, users were asked in tweets to send money in the crypto currency Bitcoin to a certain account - combined with the promise to repay the amount twice.
After the hack, which was very embarrassing for the company, Twitter had declared that some employees had been "manipulated" and that the attackers had been able to use their login data to gain access to the company's internal systems.
"This attack was based on a significant and coordinated attempt to deceive certain employees and exploit human weaknesses to gain access to our internal systems," Twitter had announced at the time.
Since then, access to those systems has been "significantly limited".
According to the attack, 130 user accounts were affected.
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