In the US, a British man who used high-profile Twitter accounts as tools in a Bitcoin scam was sentenced to prison.
In July 2020, Joseph O'Connor, a Liverpool native, took control of more than 130 accounts, among them those of Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.
The 24-year-old admitted guilt to charges of hacking last month.
He received a five-year sentence for cybercrimes on Friday, according to the southern district of New York's US Attorney's Office.
The hacking was a component of a significant Bitcoin hoax that involved tweets asking followers to send bitcoin to an account in exchange for the chance to double their money.
A rough estimate of 350 million Twitter users saw suspicious tweets from the official accounts of some of the biggest users of the service, including Apple, Uber, Kanye West, and Bill Gates.
Thousands of people were tricked into thinking a crypto giveaway was real.
Why did Twitter get hacked?
O'Connor, who used the alias PlugwalkJoe, was extradited from Spain to the US in April and entered a plea of guilty to charges of hacking last month. These charges carried a potential sentence of up to more than 70 years if found guilty.
Graham Clark, a 17-year-old American, admitted his involvement in the fraud in 2021 after being charged alongside three other men in connection with the scheme.
In order to persuade a select group of Twitter employees to divulge their internal login information over the phone, the hackers used a plausible story. This ultimately allowed the hackers access to Twitter's administrative tools.
To gain access to the site's potent internal control panel, they used social engineering techniques that were more akin to con artists than high-level cybercriminals.
O'Connor "harassed, threatened, and extorted his victims, causing substantial emotional harm," according to US Assistant Attorney-General Kenneth Polite Jr., who also called his actions "flagrant and malicious.".
O'Connor admitted to other hacking crimes, including accessing a well-known TikTok account and stalking a child, according to the US justice department.
According to the US justice department, he was also required to pay almost $800,000 in forfeiture.
