Spain's High Court granted the US extradition request for a British citizen named Joseph James O'Connor.
O'Connor is the figure behind the hacking of a number of popular Twitter accounts in the United States in 2020, including US President Joe Biden and former US President Barack Obama. He was arrested in Estepona, a city in Spain in July 2021, we were quoted as saying by Reuters, Tuesday (21/2/2023).
Although the US extradition request has been approved by the High Court, the Spanish Government still has to approve it first. Then O'Connor can still appeal the decision, because he had previously filed an objection to the extradition.
According to Spain's High Court, the United States is in a better position to sentence O'Connor. This is because the evidence for O'Connor's crimes is in the United States, including the damage caused by the hack.
This hacking incident occurred in July 2020, at that time a number of well-known verified accounts were hijacked. Including the account of Joe Biden -- at that time still the status of a US presidential candidate -- and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter.
In addition, the accounts that became victims also belonged to former US President Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Kanye West.
The hacker uses the victim's account to seek donations in the form of crypto assets. As a result of this action, Twitter had to disable sending tweets from a number of verified accounts for several hours.
When it was reported, Elon Musk became the first account to be hacked. In his post he will double the payment sent to the bitcoin address listed. After a while, Bill Gates' account tweeted the same thing.
"Everyone begging me to give back, it's time. I doubled all posts to my BTS address in 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send $2,000 back," Gates' side of the tweet read.
The tweet first appeared on the Microsoft founder's account at 1:34 p.m. Wednesday afternoon but was later deleted. The same tweet appeared again at 1:48 p.m.
After a few minutes of tweets from well-known figures being posted, bitcoin accounts that appeared in several tweets were noted to have recorded 320 transactions and received more than USD 113 thousand. The impact of this hack made Twitter shares slump more than 3%.