PlugWalkJoe

July 16, 2020

Who’s Behind Wednesday’s Epic Twitter Hack?

This post was originally published on this siteTwitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter administrative tools. This post is an attempt to lay out some of the timeline of this attack, and point to clues about who may have been behind it. The first public signs of the intrusion came around 3 PM EST, when the Twitter account for the cryptocurrency […]
July 22, 2020

Twitter Hacking for Profit and the LoLs

This post was originally published on this siteThe New York Times last week ran an interview with several young men who claimed to have had direct contact with those involved in last week’s epic hack against Twitter. These individuals said they were only customers of the person who had access to Twitter’s internal employee tools, and were not responsible for the actual intrusion or bitcoin scams that took place that day. But new information suggests that at least two of them operated a service that resold access to Twitter employees for the purposes of modifying or seizing control of prized […]
July 31, 2020

Three Charged in July 15 Twitter Compromise

This post was originally published on this siteThree individuals have been charged for their alleged roles in the July 15 hack on Twitter, an incident that resulted in Twitter profiles for some of the world’s most recognizable celebrities, executives and public figures sending out tweets advertising a bitcoin scam. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s Twitter account on the afternoon of July 15. Nima “Rolex” Fazeli, a 22-year-old from Orlando, Fla., was charged in a criminal complaint in Northern California with aiding and abetting intentional access to a protected computer. Mason “Chaewon” Sheppard, a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis, U.K., also was charged […]
July 26, 2021

PlugwalkJoe Does the Perp Walk

This post was originally published on this site Joseph “PlugwalkJoe” O’Connor, in a photo from a paid press release on Sept. 02, 2020, pitching him as a trustworthy cryptocurrency expert and advisor. One day after last summer’s mass-hack of Twitter, KrebsOnSecurity wrote that 22-year-old British citizen Joseph “PlugwalkJoe” O’Connor appeared to have been involved in the incident. When the U.S. Justice Department last week announced O’Connor’s arrest and indictment, his alleged role in the Twitter compromise was well covered in the media. But most of the coverage seems to have overlooked the far more sinister criminal charges in the indictment, […]