Twitter hacker’s court hearing hacked

MIAMI: A court hearing held via Zoom for a teenager accused of masterminding a stunning hack of Twitter was interrupted on Wednesday with rap music and porn, a newspaper reported.

The purpose of the hearing was to discuss reducing bail terms set for the 17-year-old Tampa resident arrested last Friday over the hack last month of the accounts of major US celebrities.

But the interruptions with music, shrieking and pornography became so frequent that Judge Christopher Nash ended up suspending it for a while, the Tampa Bay Times said.

Investigators view the youth, whose name has been withheld because he is a minor, as the brains behind the mid-July cyberattack that rocked Twitter.

Bail for the 17-year-old was set for US$725,000 (RM3.1 million) and in the hearing his lawyers were seeking to reduce it.

After the judge suspended the hearing and eventually resumed it, hackers went at it again, with interruptions that disguised their user names as organisations such as CNN and BBC.

In the end, Judge Nash ruled against reducing the youth’s bail.

The teen was arrested along with two others, aged 19 and 22, one of whom lives in Britain, and was charged with cyber fraud.

The hackers accessed dozens of Twitter accounts of people such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk, after gaining access to the system with an attack that tricked a handful of employees into giving up their credentials.

The hack affected at least 130 accounts, with tweets posted by the usurpers duping people into sending US$100,000 in Bitcoin, supposedly in exchange for double the amount sent. – AFP