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Porn Video Disrupts Florida Court’s Zoom Hearing for Alleged Celebrity Twitter Hacker

August 6, 2020

KrebsonSecurity reported on August 5 that a court hearing for 17-year-old Graham Clark of Tampa, Florida (the alleged mastermind of the July 15 hack against Twitter) was terminated swiftly after someone injected a pornographic video clip into the proceeding.

The incident happened during a Zoom bond hearing. Clark was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of social engineering his way into Twitter's internal computer systems and then tweeting out a bitcoin scam by compromising the accounts of high-profile Twitter users.

Notice of the hearing was available via public records filed with the Florida state attorney's office. The notice specified the Zoom meeting time and ID number, allowing anyone to participate in the proceeding.

Before the hearing officially began, it was clear to anyone knowledgeable about Zoom that the hearing might be "zoom bombed." While participants were muted by default, they were free to unmute their microphones and transmit their own video streams to the channel.

Less than a minute had passed after the hearing started before one attendee interrupted a discussion between Clark's attorney and the judge by streaming a live video of himself adjusting his face mask. A few minutes later, someone else began playing loud music.

Presiding Judge Christopher C. Nash was personally in charge of administering the video hearing and told participants he was removing the troublemakers as quickly as he could. It is not clear whether Nash himself set up the hearing. Zoom's default settings would prevent photo bombing. Someone obviously unchecked one or more of the default settings.

And that resulted in someone broadcasting a graphic video clip from Pornhub for approximately 15 seconds before Judge Nash ended the broadcast. As we have said many times, using Zoom requires training to understand its settings. Zoom has very responsibly made the default settings secure – which they were not in the beginning of the pandemic. But user error – and this is a great case in point – can undo all the security measures.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
3975 University Drive, Suite 225|Fairfax, VA 22030
Email: Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
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