Update: The story of the Pakistani twins accused of deleting U.S. government databases after getting fired just got funnier

Not long ago, we covered the story of the Ahkter twins: hackers who the Biden administration had hired despite their illegal hacking history, and how when they got fired, they took out a few government databases with them.

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But it was odd how precisely the government was able to relate the pair's conversations during the mass deletion caper.

Were they bugged?

The answer to that is a hilarious "no."

Arstechnica discovered that they had been fired via a Teams meeting, and the twins had simply forgot to turn off the recording while they committed their crime.

Here's how prosecutors put it:

On February 18, 2025, two human resources (HR) employees of Company-1 [Opexus] scheduled a Microsoft Teams meeting with Sohaib and Muneeb. Sohaib recorded the meeting starting at 4:48pm Eastern Standard Time. The HR personnel left the meeting approximately 2 minutes and 40 seconds into the recording. Apparently unbeknownst to the defendants, the meeting continued recording the next hour of interactions between the brothers.

Here's the most damning evidence:

SOHAIB: ‘How do you still have access? When did you connect to their VPN?'

MUNEEB: ‘10 minutes before their stupid meeting.'

SOHAIB: ‘You might still have access to it until the end of the day. Until at least 6 hours.'

MUNEEB: ‘Don't worry about it man. Don't worry about it.'

SOHAIB: ‘I see you are cleaning out their database backups.'

MUNEEB: ‘Don't worry about it. You don't do nothing. Don't try nothin'. They are looking at you, they are not looking at me.'

SOHAIB: ‘[G]oing to RDP into their systems and delete all their data.'

Both pled guilty, though Muneeb has been trying to change his plea ever since his conviction. With evidence this damning, it's hard to imagine why.