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The 17-year-old hacker who led the group that attacked Twitter has pleaded not guilty.
According to Reuters, the Florida teenager has told Judge Christopher Nash in Tampa that he is not guilty of the 30 crimes he is accused of, including fraud.
He is scheduled to appear before the judge again today, Wednesday, August 5th, to discuss the $750,000 bail and the conditions for his possible release.
The 17-year-old apparently cashed at least $100,000 from the scam that exploited illegal access to Twitter profiles of several celebrities, out of a total of over $145,000 collected.
The other two accused accomplices are a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis in the UK, Mason Sheppard aka Chaewon, and a 22-year-old from Orlando, Florida, Nima Fazeli aka Rolex.
Is the Twitter hacker a 17-year-old?
According to the investigators, there’s no doubt about it. The 17-year-old from Tampa used social engineering techniques to convince a Twitter employee of being a member of the company’s IT department and to provide him with credentials to access the platform’s customer service portal.
In reality, several people claim that the attack seems too big to have been carried out by a 17-year-old hacker, who later proved negligent, with two even more careless accomplices, and the accused’s plea of not guilty actually proves nothing.
The question will therefore remain unresolved until the court gives its ruling, however, there are no alternative hypotheses that the investigators may be working on. In other words, for the time being, the only concrete hypothesis on which the investigations and the judiciary are focusing is that of the 17-year-old boy from Tampa and his accomplices.
Meanwhile, Twitter is also continuing its investigation. The social network has confirmed that some employees have also been victims of a phishing attack. The team is working to improve the security of the platform.