Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Spain Orders Extradition of British Alleged Hacker to US

Spanish Court agreed to extradite Joseph James O’Connor to he U.S., who allegedly took part in the July 2020 hacking of Twitter accounts of public figures such as Joseph Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Gates.

Spain’s National Court has agreed to the extradition to the U.S. of a British citizen who allegedly took part in computer attacks, including the July 2020 hacking of Twitter accounts of public figures such as Joseph Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Gates.

A court statement Friday said requirements had been met for handing over Joseph James O’Connor to U.S. authorities for 14 charges covering crimes such as revelation of secrets, membership of a criminal gang, illegal access to computer systems, internet fraud, money laundering and extortion.

O’Connor, 23, from Liverpool, England was arrested in the southern Spanish coastal town of Estepona in July 2021.

He is accused of hacking some 130 Twitter accounts. The court document said he is also wanted for hacking the Snapchat account of an unidentified public figure whom he allegedly tried to extort with the threat of publishing nude photographs of the person.

He is also wanted for several cases of “swatting,” prank calls to emergency services aimed at getting large numbers of police to be sent to different locations.

The court rejected arguments by O’Connor’s lawyers that he should be tried in Spain since the servers he used were located there.

The statement said he is wanted by courts in the Northern District of California and the Southern District of New York. The extradition order can be appealed.

Written By

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Application Security

PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.

Cybercrime

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.