British hacker gets five years after hacking Joe Biden and Geert Wilders

23-year-old British hacker Joseph James O’Conner has been sentenced to five years in prison. The young hacker has broken into known Twitter accounts of both Joe Bidon and Geert Wilders. But this is not the only thing the British cybercriminal has done.

Twitter hacked

Earlier in 2020, a 22-year-old Dutch man was arrested who would have been involved in a Twitter hack of Geert Wilders’ account. An arrest followed in collaboration with American authorities. This man was then accused of hacking and subsequently taking over the Twitter account of Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Although the Dutch suspect was interrogated and a suspect remained in the case, he has not been detained. It later turns out that this was in collaboration with O’Conner, who has now finally been arrested.

Cooperation of cybercriminals

The cooperation between various hackers has led to access to programs that Twitter uses. They were able to crack this program, or internal system, which allowed them to easily hack into the accounts of famous people. For example, O’Conner seems to have helped deactivate the extra security on Geert Wilders’ account. The profile of the PVV leader was used to tweet conspiracy theories and scam people. For example, people were scammed through bitcoins that people transferred to various well-known accounts. The amount earned from this seems to have been divided among them. The cybercriminals have been able to make a lot of money with this. This is probably almost 88,000 euros.

Bitcoin spam and sextortion

Not only the Twitter profiles of Kanya West, Bill Gades, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the rapper Ye and various large companies such as Uber and Apple were hacked by the British hacker. Bella Thorne’s Snapchat account was also hacked. He managed to access this in 2019, where he found nude photos of the actress. O’Conner threatened Bella with leaking the photos. Bella Thorne’s response was to release the photos herself, to maintain some control over the situation. Apparently, the man has also often sent police to homes where several minors live. In this scam, he pretended to be the minor during telephone conversations with the police. Why he does all this is not yet clear.

Consequences for British hacker

O’Connor, also known as PlugwalkJoe as an online name, was arrested in 2023 in Estepona, Spain. Spain subsequently extradited him to the United States in April. Here he confessed to his criminal activities and on June 23 he was told what his sentence will be. This could be several decades in prison. As part of the scare, O’Connor has to pay his proceeds of almost 729,000 euros. In addition, he must compensate victims with emotional damage. The damage he has left behind with extortions, threats and harassing various people is unprecedented. It is therefore nice that he has now been arrested, so that there are not several victims.