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Some of those affected whose Twitter accounts were hijacked last July: A 22-year-old claims he can hack Trump
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The Spanish police have arrested a British man who is believed to have been involved in a massive hacking attack on prominent Twitter accounts. An international arrest warrant was issued by the US judiciary against the 22-year-old Joseph O., reported the newspaper "La Vanguardia" on Thursday. The man was arrested the day before in Estepona near Málaga in southern Spain. According to the Reuters news agency, he is said to have claimed online that he could take over Donald Trump's Twitter account.
The Twitter hack made headlines in July 2020 because the accounts of politicians like Joe Biden or Barack Obama, entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk and around 120 other well-known accounts were taken over. The perpetrators then distributed several Bitcoin addresses via the accounts, claiming that anyone who transfers money there would get double the amount back. At least some actually fell for this scam. Within a few hours, numerous transactions with a total amount of more than 100,000 euros were received on one of the Bitcoin addresses.
The mastermind behind the attack is an 18-year-old who is said to have been in relevant cybercrime forums under the name "Kirk". He had confessed to a court in Florida in March and accepted three years of juvenile detention. The investigators apparently got on the trail of Joseph O. after the FBI had interrogated another alleged person involved in the hacker attack, reports Reuters.
After the incident, Twitter confirmed that the attackers had succeeded in gaining access to internal systems and had to admit that the private information of the hacked celebrities was also visible to the attackers.
The company apologized for IT security issues after the incident.
Possibly in response to the incident and public criticism, the company hired the renowned expert Peiter Zatko as the new head of security.
hpp / dpa
