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Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

troyhunt.com

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Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#71

Post by thrwaway69 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #68
brenden2 wrote: post #7

My take: I don't think the government understands how must distrust there is for public institutions. The fact that they keep going on these pressers and lying to the public, only to be discredited after the fact, shows how tone deaf and disconnected from reality the politicians are. What's even more bizarre is all the people who are cheering on the police brutality, and encouraging more violence against unarmed prot…

> What's even more bizarre is all the people who are cheering on the police brutality, and encouraging more violence against unarmed protestors. There’s lots of people cheering on the violence. The strangest are the white collar professionals, the celebrities, and the executives. I will say, in a few instances it felt good when these Twitter agitators got spooked as the violence they wished upon others neared their o…

Historically they used to do this for slaves where they would fight each other for entertainment of the elites or upper class people. It seems perfectly in align with that.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#72

Post by thrwaway69 »

alexpetralia wrote: post #42
thebean11 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming outside instigators is a common tactic for downplaying unrest. I'm not saying you're wrong, and I agree Russia does run campaigns with the purpose of sowing tensions, but I'm very skeptical of any causality between Russia and the movement, protests, or riots.

#dcBlackout was trending on Twitter last night. How do you explain that? There were _tons_ of accounts I saw (many with Korean/Chinese avatars, which were probably fronts) that were spreading the same misinformation, often were a shrill tone of panic and conspiracy. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-dc-blackout-pro... For the curious, this is called a Sybil attack.

Boi the replies.

https://twitter.com/DMVBlackLives/status/1267521033273323520...

https://twitter.com/VictoriaSanchez/status/12674378765198622...

I am wondering if all those are bots or propaganda accounts. A sufficiently trained GPT2 model could tweet the same.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#73

Post by taneq »

genghisjahn wrote: post #11
raverbashing wrote: post #10

Most often, when the media/pr announces a "sophisticated cyber attack" has happened, what actually has happened is that the password was "123456" or the site ran an old WordPress version, etc

Example?

The Cambridge Analytica scandal comes to mind. It was reported in some places as a "hack" when they literally just used Facebook's APIs for their intended purposes.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#74

Post by shuntress »

harry8 wrote: post #31
chroem- wrote: post #24

Russia was caught running ads during the 2016 election that were sympathetic to radical white and black nationalist groups, with the end goal of sowing racial tensions. [0] I'm of the firm belief that we're being played by a hostile state actor here. I have no way of proving this, but I strongly suspect that Russia and/or China are trying to spur on the unrest through digital disinformation like in the OP. EDIT: by u…

From overseas this looks like someone abjectly refusing to face it's countries problems. I don't think Russia or any other nation could possibly have anything more than the most minimal effect on what happens when you have an underclass, who have just lost their jobs on mass and with it their health insurance looking at whether Bezos who pays no tax is going to become a trilionaire while the disease of police brutali…

It's not about fabricating an otherwise nonexistent problem into being.

It is about applying the right pressure in the right place at the right time.

For example: jumping in with some social media accounts to schedule a protest for just before sundown (or finding one that happens to be scheduled that poorly to begin with) and using bot accounts to boost it's visibility, increase turnout, and increase the chances that enough stupid people are in the same place at the same time so that something stupid happens.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#75

Post by Causality1 »

tialaramex wrote: post #49

> it's extremely unusual to see the same email address with multiple different passwords in a legitimate data breach as most systems simply won't let an address register more than once I've actually built a system which did this years ago, over our initial protestations, and the reasoning went like this: Our client (this was a white label product) has lots of elderly couples as customers, these are our end users and…

I've also seen it happen when a system changes its email parameters, like switching from considering the TLD to ignoring it. Suddenly john@email.com and john@email.net are sharing the same account, or have two different accounts and usernames linked to the same address.

I had a family tech support session on this exact issue last week. A relative cleared her cookies and found her saved email and password for Facebook were logging her into a profile she'd never seen before. At some point Facebook had decided name@netzero.net and name@netzero.com were the same thing. We got around the issue by logging in using her account name gleaned from someone on her friends list.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#76

Post by mr_spothawk »

thrwaway69 wrote: post #72
alexpetralia wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#dcBlackout was trending on Twitter last night. How do you explain that? There were _tons_ of accounts I saw (many with Korean/Chinese avatars, which were probably fronts) that were spreading the same misinformation, often were a shrill tone of panic and conspiracy. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-dc-blackout-pro... For the curious, this is called a Sybil attack.

Boi the replies. https://twitter.com/DMVBlackLives/status/1267521033273323520... https://twitter.com/VictoriaSanchez/status/12674378765198622... I am wondering if all those are bots or propaganda accounts. A sufficiently trained GPT2 model could tweet the same.

was thinking maybe it was content targetted at a non-us audience. could see deploying bots in open disinfo op, tho.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#77

Post by bravo22 »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #69
bravo22 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fringe elements are blending into the crowds. The poor protestors are getting gassed. Let's not create this narrative that the majority of protestors are out to loot and damage property. They're not. And most of the ones who are causing damage aren't black.

>Let's not create this narrative that the majority of protestors are out to loot and damage property. It doesn't matter who is looting or causing damage to property if their actions are being used to justify retaliation against every protester. Separating the "fringe elements is being done by the media and the government to allow more authoritarian responses. It is not being done out of goodwill for the law abiding p…

I think it does matter. This is an issue that is affecting black people. White people who are protesting should be doing it to support them, not to hijack their movement and running it how they see fit.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#78

Post by jobigoud »

amrrs wrote: post #12
rvz wrote: post #4

Great analysis on uncovering a credential stuffing attack (using passwords found from a previous breach) disguised as a "MPD hack" by "Anonymous" which Troy also discussed here. [0] > But anger shouldn't mean throwing logic and reason out the window and I cannot think of a time where fact-checking has ever been more important than now, not just because of the Minneapolis situation, but because so much of what we see…

My heuristics is, By default, Anything controversial I see on the internet is fake until it's proven to be true. I've been advocating this to my parents and a few others for quite a while. Especially from a country like India where there are people being lynched and killed just based on WhatsApp videos (mostly fake), Skepticism is required more than ever.

This rule means you have to consider almost everything as fake. Like say, a video of police brutality filmed by one person. How do you "prove" it to be non fake?

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#79

Post by boomboomsubban »

bravo22 wrote: post #77
boomboomsubban wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let's not create this narrative that the majority of protestors are out to loot and damage property. It doesn't matter who is looting or causing damage to property if their actions are being used to justify retaliation against every protester. Separating the "fringe elements is being done by the media and the government to allow more authoritarian responses. It is not being done out of goodwill for the law abiding p…

I think it does matter. This is an issue that is affecting black people. White people who are protesting should be doing it to support them, not to hijack their movement and running it how they see fit.

Why would it matter who hijacked a movement the moment before it is forcibly ended? These "fringe elements" don't matter, what's important is what started these protests and what is being done to silence them.

Re: Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department “hack”

#80

Post by lultimouomo »

vimslayer wrote: post #65
didntknowyou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shopify has a similar thing, a two stage login where you sign in with your email then choose your account.

Microsoft has their notorious "is this account personal or issued by company it department" (or something like that) question when you login. Which is the reason it very often takes two tries and several minutes to get logged in as I never seem to guess the correct answer to that question...

Extra credits for when Azure DevOps Server requires you the other kind of login compared to actual Azure, or for when you log in with one kind and the next time you access the service you are randomly switched over to the other.

Also the fact that when you ask your login to be remembered the will just show you the email at the next login, without telling you if it's the personal or work account.

It is the worst login experience Iv've ever had, bar none, I am constantly amazed how they could ship that and always wonder what hellish dungeon of reasons there must be behind the decision to keep it as it is.

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