Twitter hacker ordered to pay back £4.1m worth of Bitcoin


A Twitter hacker who breached the accounts of celebrities including Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos has been forced to hand over £4million. Joseph James O’Connor, 26, was jailed in the US for the hacks which involved scamming people out of Bitcoin and threatening celebrities with the release of personal images and messages.

Now the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division has obtained a Civil Recovery Order to recover 42 Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, that O’Connor made from the scheme, which holds the value of around £4.1m.

Read more…
Source: The Crown Prosecution Service


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Europol Warns WannaCry Spread to Go Up on Monday

    May 14, 2017

    Europol is spreading bad news today as it announced that a new wave of WannaCry ransomware infections, even worse than the first, is coming on Monday. The European law enforcement agency estimates that so far there are some 200,000 victims of WannaCry and the number keeps growing. Furthermore, the number of affected countries has grown from ...

  • Europol News Article on Wannacry Ransomware: recent cyber-attack

    May 13, 2017

    The European Cybercrime Centre, EC3, at Europol is working closely with affected countries cybercrime units and key industry partners to mitigate the threat and assist victims. The recent attack is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits. The Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (JCAT), at EC3 is a ...

  • UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vulnerability to raid IT

    May 12, 2017

    UK hospitals have effectively shut down and are turning away non-emergency patients after ransomware ransacked its networks. Some 16 NHS organizations across Blighty – including several hospital trusts such as NHS Mid-Essex CCG and East and North Hertfordshire – have had their files scrambled by a variant of the WannaCrypt, aka WanaCrypt aka Wcry, nasty. Users ...

  • FBI: Whaling now a US$ 5 billion business as execs targeted

    May 9, 2017

    The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reported the continuing explosion of Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks as the practice becomes a US$ 5 billion (£3.86 billion) business. Between October 2013 and 2016 the total international reported loss from such scams is US$ 5,302,890,449 (£4,100 million), with US bodies taking up nearly US$ 1.6 billion ...

  • Snake and Proton Malware Found Targeting Mac Users

    May 8, 2017

    Two malware targeting Mac-run machines recently surfaced in the wild: Snake (a.k.a. Turla, Uroburos, and Agent.BTZ, and detected by Trend Micro as OSX_TURLA.A) and Proton (OSX_PROTON.A). Both are remote access Trojans that can grant attackers unauthorized remote access to the system, consequently enabling them to steal files, data, and credentials stored in the affected system, ...

  • Hackers emit 9GB of stolen Macron ’emails’ two days before French presidential election

    May 6, 2017

    Emmanuel Macron, the front-runner in France’s presidential election, has condemned the online leakage of what’s alleged to be his campaign staff’s emails. A 9GB cache of internal documents was dumped onto the Magnet file-sharing network on Friday night, less than two days before the French people go to the polls on Sunday. These archives landed just before ...