The FBI on Thursday arrested two North Carolina men allegedly involved in last year’s hack of CIA Director John Brennan, and cited incriminating messages sent privately over Twitter between the two.
The alleged members of “Crackas with Attitude” included 22-year-old Andrew Boggs and 24-year-old Justin Liverman, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The group took credit in October 2015 for breaching Brennan’s AOL account by using “social engineering” techniques, specifically by impersonating Brennan over the telephone and convincing customer service representatives to hand over his credentials.
The group went on a subsequent months-long hacking spree that targeted government officials and high profile leaders in the intelligence community, including Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and FBI Director James Comey.
Despite their alleged prowess at impersonating members of the intelligence community, the suspects seem not to have been particularly tech savvy. The FBI said both used home computers to log into Twitter, dump stolen information and brag about the hacks. The agency easily traced the IP addresses to discover the pair, both of whom lived with family members.
The FBI published a log of Twitter messages sent between Boggs and Liverman, who went online respectively as “Incursio” and “D3f4ult,” in which they appeared to show some awareness that they could be traced. “I’m going to help you with 0wning,” Boggs said in one exchange. “If you need any publishing done, let me know I’ll go Charlotte [sic] and use public wifi to publish the stolen information.
A user named “Cracka,” who led the group, allegedly asked Liverman to use an encrypted communication platform called Jabber in November 2015, which would have prevented messages from being intercepted. But according to the FBI’s affidavit, Liverman diligently saved backups of the encrypted conversations, allowing the agency to retrieve them from his physical hard drive.
Authorities in the United Kingdom arrested a 16-year-old allegedly behind the “Cracka” persona in February, as well as a 15-year-old thought to be a perpetrator named “Cubed,” after which the group ceased operating. The FBI presumptively had clues leading to Boggs and Liverman at that time, both of whom had become paranoid, according to the affidavit.
