A British hacker, Joseph O’Connor, aka the PlugwalkJoe, has been sentenced to 5 years in a United States jail for stealing $794,000 value of crypto by a SIM swap assault.
The SIM swap assault case
O’Connor was initially arrested in Spain in July 2021 for his involvement in a SIM swap assault on a crypto change government in 2019. He was later extradited to the USA on April 26, 2023. In Might, he pleaded responsible to a number of costs, together with conspiracy to commit pc intrusions, wire fraud, and cash laundering.
The identification of the hacked crypto government has not been disclosed. Between March and Might 2019, O’Connor and his co-conspirators efficiently executed SIM swap assaults on three firm executives. By gaining unauthorized entry to a number of accounts and pc techniques, they may steal and divert cryptocurrency value roughly $794,000 on the time, now valued at over $1.6 million.
After the theft, O’Connor and his co-conspirators laundered the stolen cryptocurrency by varied transfers and transactions, exchanging a few of it for bitcoin utilizing cryptocurrency change providers. A portion of the stolen cryptocurrency was deposited right into a crypto change account managed by O’Connor.
The jail sentence was introduced in a press release on June 23 by the USA Legal professional’s Workplace for the Southern District of New York, which additionally talked about that O’Connor can be topic to 3 years of supervised launch. He has been ordered to pay $794,012.64 in forfeiture.
O’Connor’s further crimes and costs
Along with the SIM swap assault, O’Connor pleaded responsible to a number of different crimes associated to the key Twitter hack in July 2020. O’Connor and his crew hacked round 130 outstanding Twitter accounts and accounts on TikTok and Snapchat, utilizing social engineering strategies and SIM-swapping assaults. They used these outstanding, compromised accounts to defraud different Twitter customers or promote entry to them.
O’Connor’s costs embody blackmailing. He blackmailed a sufferer on Snapchat by threatening to launch personal messages publicly except they promoted O’Connor’s on-line persona. He stalked and threatened one other sufferer and orchestrated swatting assaults by falsely reporting emergencies to authorities or sending messages to the households of his victims, threatening to take their life.
Though O’Connor’s crimes occurred years in the past, SIM swap assaults nonetheless stay a problem within the crypto sector. These assaults contain taking management of a sufferer’s telephone quantity by linking it to a different SIM card managed by the attacker, permitting them to reroute calls and messages and getting access to accounts that use SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA).