FBI’s Tracking Operation Against Twitter Hackers

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The United States Law Enforcement has witnessed three-person for the recent Twitter hack. They were suspected and taken to custody. The case is also taken to the court. According to all the court reports, documents, and papers, the FBI believes that they have tracked down the right people.

Now, the FBI will investigate all the matter carefully. After that, they will present all the valid technical information to the court. Thereafter, the court will analyze them. It will take a few days and then the responsible people will be given the desired punishment.

When it all started and by whom?

The activities started on May 3rd when they got access to a certain portion of Twitter’s network. There are three people that the FBI thinks to be guilty. They are Graham Ivan Clarke, Mason Sheppard, and Nima Fazeli.

Clarke is suspected to be the mastermind of the entire operation. His procedure has penetrated through Twitter’s firewall and gained access to all the high profile accounts.

Which Twitter Accounts was the bait?

High profile people became the victim of this Twitter hacking operation. Starting from the creator of Microsoft, Bill Gates (William Henry Gates III), Barack Hussain Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Michael Bloomberg, and others. In addition to that, the cab giant, Uber also got into the picture.

What is the purpose of this operation?

After the operation was successful, Clarke earned bitcoins worth more than $1 million in a single day. He planned to earn more in the next couple of days. But, the FBI refuted his plans by arresting him.

The Punishment

According to the court, Clarke will face a lot of charges as punishment. If he pays off all the charges, then he will be released by the court according to the law of enforcement.

A pre-planned fraud case for the entire operation. The penalty amount will be $50,000.
Fraud of communications. The penalty amount will be $300 in one count.
The fraud of hijacking personal information. The amount of penalty is over $1 million if the victim increases to over 30 people.
The crime of using high profile people’s personal information and earning money from it. The penalty amount will be given by the court as per the analysis.
Doing fraud by using a computer system, the internet, and any type of electronic device. The penalty amount will also be declared by the court after full analysis.

The master-mind will not be released by the FBI until the judgement is done completely. Then, the court will hand over the papers for paying off the penalty amounts.

A Short Summary of the entire incident

Let’s dive into the quick session of what really happened in the entire hijacking incident.

It happened in the month of July 15th, 2020.
According to Twitter, it was a mobile-based social engineering hijacking operation.
Reports say that Twitter has confirmed that their employee’s accounts also became victims.
Once the hackers got on to Twitter’s back-end, they used Twitter’s own tools to interact with the accounts.
The mastermind behind it has accessed more than 130 accounts in a single day.
For the 45 accounts, the hackers have initiated the operation of password reset.
They also have downloaded all the data from 8 selected accounts.

The investigation is underway. Soon the court will declare the investigation results with prior notifications.