Zoom-Bombers Disrupt Bail Hearing for Alleged Twitter Hacker

[Prem Kumar]

Zoom-Bombers Disrupt Bail Hearing for Alleged Twitter Hacker

A virtual bail hearing for the 17-year-old accused of masterminding last month's epic Twitter hack was—ironically—taken over in a Zoom-bombing attack.

Lawyers for the suspect, Graham Ivan Clark, were asking the judge to lower his $725,000 bail in a court session held over Zoom on Wednesday when the hijackers struck, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Loud rap music, ramblings in other languages, and eventually porn was played over the video meeting.

The hijackers appear to have infiltrated the virtual court session by posing as journalists with CNN and BBC. They then exploited how the Zoom meeting was configured to allow anyone to share their computer screen as the host, paving the way for the malicious takeover.

The interruptions were bad enough that the judge had to stop the court session early. "Predictably, the Zoom hearing for the 17-year-old alleged Twitter hacker in Fla. was bombed multiple times, with the final bombing of a pornhub clip ending the zoom portion of the proceedings," tweeted security journalist Brian Krebs.

Clark has been charged with instigating the July 15 hack of Twitter, which resulted in dozens of VIP accounts getting hijacked to promote a Bitcoin scam. Allegedly, he gained access by calling several Twitter employees and tricking them into giving up login credentials for the company's account management tools.

Clark now faces the prospect of being tried in Florida as an adult for breaching Twitter's internal systems. However, the Zoom hijacking incident indicates he may have some fans in the hacking community.  According to The New York Times, Clark joined a hacker's forum when he was only 15, and may have been involved in an $856,000 bitcoin heist.