Graham Ivan Clark, the teenage hacker the authorities accused of mentoring the infamous Bitcoin hack on Twitter last year, pleaded guilty to 30 charges against him. As part of the deal, he agreed to serve a three-year prison sentence in a juvenile institution. According The New York Times and Tampa Bay Times, he was classified as a “juvenile offender” under Florida law, which allowed him to avoid the minimum 10-year sentence he would have received as an adult.
Clark was arrested in July 2020, when he was still 17, along with two other individuals, a few weeks after the Twitter hack that took control of several important accounts. On July 15 of last year, some of the most followed personalities and companies on the site – including President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Uber, Apple, Kanye West and Jeff Bezos – tweeted that they were “donating back to the community “and would double any Bitcoin sent to a specific wallet. The attackers managed to get $ 117,000 in Bitcoin before the scheme ended.
After investigating the security breach, Twitter announced that criminals had hacked into compromised accounts through social engineering. They apparently targeted Twitter employees with access to internal systems and tools, which they used to take control of highly visible accounts. These tools not only gave them the power to change account details and passwords, but they also gave them access to the account owners’ DMs. In fact, Twitter confirmed that the attackers exported data for “up to eight of the accounts involved”. NYT claims that Clark and his colleagues originally used their access to Twitter’s internal system to take over accounts with one-word or unusual usernames, like @dark, which they then sold on the OGUsers forum to thousands. They changed tactics along the way and instead applied the Bitcoin scam.
According to a profile, the NYT published after his arrest, Clark was already caught stealing Bitcoins from a Seattle technology investor in 2019, but was not arrested because he was a minor. Clark handed over all Bitcoins to his possession after being arrested and agreed not to use computers without police permission or supervision as part of the deal. He could serve part of his sentence at a military training camp, but he could also spend up to 10 years in adult prison if he violates the terms of the agreement.