A judge was forced to suspend the virtual bond hearing of the 17-year-old accused of being the “mastermind” behind the recent massive Twitter hack, after several people got into the Zoom meeting posing as CNN and BBC staffers and played loud music and even a porn video. Multiple reporters who attended the hearing via Zoom on Wednesday confirmed the incident.
According to independent security journalist Brian Krebs, the problem was that the judge and his clerks did not set up the meeting in a way that would mute attendees and prevent them from taking over the screen (these are features that can be easily set when one creates a Zoom meeting).
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“Judges holding hearings over Zoom need to get a clue,” Krebs wrote on Twitter.
Graham Clark, 17, is accused of being the mastermind behind a gang of hackers who socially engineered multiple Twitter employees to take control of an internal tool. The tool allowed them to take over several high-profile Twitter accounts and tweet out a Bitcoin address asking people to send money with the improbable promise of sending more money back.
According to Ryan Hughes, a reporter from local outlet WFLA, Judge Christopher Nash said next time he’ll require a password. This may not be effective at stopping Zoom bombings though as passwords at least for other hearings are published online. Instead the court may need to limit Zoom screen sharing to only call administrators.
A spokesperson for the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida declined to comment and said the court was not able to share the video of the hearing.
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