<div style="text-align: justify; "><b style="font-size: 1rem;">A British national extradited to the US last month has pleaded guilty in New York to a role in one of the biggest hacks in social media history.</b><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The July 2020 Twitter hack affected over 130 accounts including those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Joseph James O'Connor, 23, known as PlugwalkJoe, pleaded guilty to hacking charges carrying a total maximum sentence of over 70 years in prison.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The US justice department said he had also used technology to stalk a minor.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">US Assistant Attorney-General Kenneth Polite Jr described in a statement O'Connor's actions as "flagrant and malicious". saying he had "harassed, threatened, and extorted his victims, causing substantial emotional harm".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Like many criminal actors, O'Connor tried to stay anonymous by using a computer to hide behind stealth accounts and aliases from outside the United States. But this plea shows that our investigators and prosecutors will identify, locate, and bring to justice such criminals to ensure they face the consequences for their crimes."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 2020, an estimated 350 million Twitter users saw suspicious tweets from official accounts of the platform's biggest users. Thousands fell for a scam, trusting that a crypto giveaway was real.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Cyber experts agreed that the consequences of the Twitter hack could have been far worse if O'Connor and other hackers had had plans more sophisticated than a get-rich-quick scheme.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Disinformation could have been spread to affect political discourse and markets could have been moved by well-worded fake business announcements for example.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The hack showed how fragile Twitter's security was at the time as the hackers managed to use social engineering tricks more akin to those of conmen than of high-level cyber criminals to get access to the powerful internal control panel at the site.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was, and still is, a hugely embarrassing moment in Twitter's troubled history.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">O'Connor's admission has not come as a shock though as there was a wealth of evidence in the public domain thanks to the hackers making some bad mistakes or being too loud in their celebrations in the aftermath of the hack. BBC</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>