Security News
Graham Ivan Clark, part of the crew that hijacked around 130 high-profile Twitter accounts and used them to collect cryptocurrency, has been sentenced to three years in prison for his part in the scam. On July 15 last year around 130 Twitter accounts from celebs like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Uber, and former president Barack Obama began displaying messages asking for Bitcoin to be sent to a wallet, whereupon the amount would be doubled and returned.
It happened in July 2020, when many prominent blue-badged Twitter accounts suddenly starting sending out scammy cryptocoin messages. "Feeling greatful , doubling all payments made to my Bitcoin address," said one message, urging people to pay out $1000 now, with a $2000 payback to follow later.
A Florida teen accused of masterminding the hacks of several high-profile Twitter accounts last summer as part of a widespread cryptocurrency scam pled guilty to fraud charges in exchange for a three-year prison sentence. On July 15, 2020, Twitter suffered one of the biggest security lapses in its history after the attackers managed to hijack nearly 130 high-profile Twitter accounts pertaining to politicians, celebrities, and musicians, including that of Barack Obama, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Uber, and Apple.
A Florida teenager has pleaded guilty to fraud charges after coordinating the hack of high-profile Twitter accounts to run a cryptocurrency scam that collected roughly $120,000 worth of bitcoins. Graham Ivan Clark was charged last year as an adult in July 2020, he turned 18 in January 2021, as the first suspect and the one who orchestrated last year's Twitter hack.
Cryptocurrency scammers have made at least $145,000 this week by promoting fake giveaways through hacked verified Twitter accounts. At the time, these scams pulled in a massive $580,000 in cryptocurrency over a one-week period.
Security researchers following the money circuit from Ryuk ransomware victims into the threat actor's pockets estimate that the criminal organization made at least $150 million. Threat intelligence companies Advanced Intelligence and HYAS tracked 61 Bitcoin wallets attributed to the Ryuk malware enterprise and discovered that the cryptocurrency moves from an intermediary to Huobi and Binance exchanges.
RubyGems, an open-source package repository and manager for the Ruby web programming language, has taken two of its software packages offline after they were found to be laced with malware. "The gems contained malware that ran itself persistently on infected Windows machines and replaced any Bitcoin or cryptocurrency wallet address it found on the user's clipboard with the attacker's," according to Ax Sharma, researcher at Sonatype, writing in a Wednesday posting.
A Russian bitcoin expert at the center of a multi-country legal tussle was sentenced in Paris on Monday to five years in prison for money laundering and ordered to pay 100,000 euros in fines in a case of suspected cryptocurrency fraud. Vinnik denies wrongdoing, and his lawyers are discussing whether to appeal.
The creator of cURL reassured The Reg on Tuesday that he's not a billionaire rocket man giving away Bitcoins, no matter what his Twitter account claimed. Daniel Stenberg, who maintains the widely used Swiss army-knife of network data transfer tools, had his verified Twitter account hijacked by person or persons unknown, its name and avatar was changed to that of Elon Musk's, and it was used to peddle a Bitcoin scam.
The feds have seized its largest stash ever of Bitcoin, originating from the notorious Silk Road underground marketplace. In 2014, the FBI auctioned off 30,000 Bitcoins that the government seized in the initial takedown, which were housed in wallet files stored on Silk Road servers.