Illustration by Alex Castro
On Friday Graham Ivan Clark was charged along with two others for the most serious hack in Twitter’s history, where numerous high-profile accounts including those of Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and Bill Gates were taken over to promote a bitcoin scam. In a new investigation, The New York Times has delved into Clark’s history, which reportedly escalated from small Minecraft scams into a hack so big that some have dubbed it a global security crisis.
Here’s how it all began, as described by the NYT:
Millions of teenagers play the same video games and interact in the same online forums as Mr. Clark. But what emerges in interviews with more than a dozen people who know him, along with legal documents, online forensic work and social media…