A Florida teenager who was accused of being the “mentor” behind a Twitter hack in July 2020 that affected Apple has agreed to a court agreement that will lead him to spend three years in prison, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
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Graham Ivan Clark, along with others, compromised the Twitter accounts of 130 prominent companies and individuals to solicit Bitcoin, deceiving people by more than $ 100,000. The official Apple account was accessed, as were accounts for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former US President Barack Obama, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and chairman Joe Biden.
Clark this week will plead guilty to state charges in exchange for three years in prison and three years of probation. As Clark was only 17 at the time of the attack, he will be sentenced as a “young offender” and will be able to serve part of his time at a military training camp.
Under the terms of the court settlement, Clark is not allowed to use computers without permission and law enforcement oversight.
Twitter conducted an internal investigation after the breach and found that hackers targeted employees in a “phone phishing attack”, leading them to think that they were talking to other Twitter employees to gain access to Twitter’s internal tools.
Mason “Chaewon” Sheppard from the UK and Nima “Rolex” Fazeli were also charged in the attack and face prison terms.