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Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

vice.com

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Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#131

Post by gundmc »

s5300 wrote: post #120
gundmc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what we know, it does sound like the attackers had full access to the accounts. That's a really interesting point about direct messages. It makes it all the more interesting that Obama and Biden and were both targets with the upcoming election. Wonder if those will start showing up on WikiLeaks again.

Does anybody on Hacker news seriously believe that the account of Biden or Obama actually send messages privately on Twitter? They most certainly don't. I have no idea why that fact is not obvious to some. Trump had two liked tweets for all of time back from like, 2012. Around 2017 or so a group realized this and bought or otherwise messed with the site the liked tweets linked to and made them have pictures making jo…

Agreed. I don't think it would turn up any skeletons, more of the implication if this breach was in any way politically motivated given our recent election meddling.

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#132

Post by __blockcipher__ »

blibble wrote: post #118
graton wrote: post #94

Anyone else unimpressed with Twitter's U2F/FIDO token support? They support a total of 1 (one) U2F token on an account :( The only other company I know that does that is AWS and one U2F token. Every other site I use allows multiples, usually at least 5 or more. I setup U2F on Twitter but then got rid of it after realizing they only allow one.

the entirety of AWS seems to be half assed in general as you've described: the U2F functionality is completely useless because if you lose/break your single U2F key then you're completely screwed and they still have no support for ed25519 keys (which were added to OpenSSH in 2013), unlike every other cloud service I have to have an RSA key just for AWS (particuraly annoying as I have all my other ssh keys stored in a…

> if they didn't validate the damn key type then it would probably just work out of the box

That thought makes it so much for frustrating. ed25519 is the future anyway, it’s hilarious how many cling to RSA (I’ve got nothing against RSA but at some point we’ll have to switch anyway)

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#133

Post by almost_usual »

ALittleLight wrote: post #99

To me, this raises the likelihood that the attack was about something else. The BTC scam just doesn't seem anywhere near worth it compared to other things you could do - selling or using insider information, blackmail, shorting Tesla, taking out politicians, etc. If the attack had been something like an exploit in the new API, I'd think, maybe some kid found it and was acting fast and reckless. If this was a sophisti…

Doesn’t make sense, value of the hack is already toast with Twitter’s credibility

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#134

Post by dmix »

Thorentis wrote: post #107
slg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes things sound even fishier. I think there has to be something else going on we don't yet know about. The amount of money this scam will actually earn the hacker is tiny compared to the potential of this hack and yet they still have enough money left over to bribe a presumably highly paid Twitter employee? Or maybe the Twitter employee is a low paid person which leads back to a question I raised elsewhere in…

The most logical conclusion is that this probably wasn't about money. Plenty of better ways to make money than telling people to give you BTC. I'm expecting a huge data drop on wikileaks/pastebin/wherever of private DMs, images, who knows what else.

Plus there was no way they knew beforehand they'd only make 12BTC. People always overestimate the value of twitter and conversion rates when an actual action is required - even with targeted audiences like cryptocurrency people in this case.

People seem to assume everyone takes tweets at face value and won't do a double take when it doesn't sound like something they would normally say.

Even here there was plenty of people on HN who were claiming outlandish possibilities while it was happening.

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#135

Post by unishark »

zmmmmm wrote: post #17

> Hawley said "please reach out immediately to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and take any necessary measures to secure the site before this breach expands It's kind of bizarre when you have the highest levels of government doing their critical communication on a free social media service to the point where they are critically dependent on it, then begging for support when things go…

Let's not forget the ongoing breach is being used to con people. Maybe that was the representative's concern.

> Maybe you shouldn't use a free service that is not under your control or any proper regulatory or quality constraints for your most important messaging to the public then?

What are you referring to exactly? I thought the govt had their own IT and websites across the board, and only used things like twitter to aid in communicating to the public.

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#136

Post by electro_blah »

freehunter wrote: post #23
zmmmmm wrote: post #17

> Hawley said "please reach out immediately to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and take any necessary measures to secure the site before this breach expands It's kind of bizarre when you have the highest levels of government doing their critical communication on a free social media service to the point where they are critically dependent on it, then begging for support when things go…

The FBI is very commonly involved in cyber crimes and the other departments have a role to play as well. Calling the FBI during a major security incident is not unusual at all, I’ve done it a number of times.

what was the outcome? did they catch the criminals?

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#137

Post by mcphilip »

I suspected some sort of internal tool was used to target prominent users but I’m still curious why there were thousands of unverified accounts tweeting the same scam. Searching for that bitcoin address pulled up tons of accounts tweeting it shortly before that term was blocked. Are there really that many trolls out there, or was a very large set of accounts hacked?

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#138

Post by ciarannolan »

s5300 wrote: post #120
gundmc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what we know, it does sound like the attackers had full access to the accounts. That's a really interesting point about direct messages. It makes it all the more interesting that Obama and Biden and were both targets with the upcoming election. Wonder if those will start showing up on WikiLeaks again.

Does anybody on Hacker news seriously believe that the account of Biden or Obama actually send messages privately on Twitter? They most certainly don't. I have no idea why that fact is not obvious to some. Trump had two liked tweets for all of time back from like, 2012. Around 2017 or so a group realized this and bought or otherwise messed with the site the liked tweets linked to and made them have pictures making jo…

I definitely don't think Obama/Biden/others would DM.

But Elon? Some of these bitcoin exchanges? Maybe. How about accounts that were accessed (if any) that never blasted out the bitcoin tweet, but had their messages harvested?

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#139

Post by hyperpape »

s5300 wrote: post #120
gundmc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what we know, it does sound like the attackers had full access to the accounts. That's a really interesting point about direct messages. It makes it all the more interesting that Obama and Biden and were both targets with the upcoming election. Wonder if those will start showing up on WikiLeaks again.

Does anybody on Hacker news seriously believe that the account of Biden or Obama actually send messages privately on Twitter? They most certainly don't. I have no idea why that fact is not obvious to some. Trump had two liked tweets for all of time back from like, 2012. Around 2017 or so a group realized this and bought or otherwise messed with the site the liked tweets linked to and made them have pictures making jo…

I agree with you.

Also, I really hope there’s a set of users whose accounts cannot have new devices connected without special authorization, and if so, you’d have Biden, Obama and Trump on that list.

Edit: 5 minutes after posting, I saw Obama and Biden were on the list of people hit, and I missed it in the early reports. Unbelievable.

Re: Twitter internal panel linked to account hijackings

#140

Post by sillysaurusx »

slg wrote: post #95
minimaxir wrote: post #68

The Vice article ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23853786 ) was recently updated with a note that the Twitter insider was paid to help take over the accounts, which raises further questions on the nature of "social engineering": > we spoke to two hackers and we were able to independently verify they were in control of hijacked accounts today. One of them said they paid the Twitter employee to help them take ov…

This makes things sound even fishier. I think there has to be something else going on we don't yet know about. The amount of money this scam will actually earn the hacker is tiny compared to the potential of this hack and yet they still have enough money left over to bribe a presumably highly paid Twitter employee? Or maybe the Twitter employee is a low paid person which leads back to a question I raised elsewhere in…

The most reasonable explanation might be that they’re lying to sound cool. Bribery is a thing, but any twitter employee would know that their employment (and future career prospects) would be terminated.

On the other hand, $1M in BTC might do the trick. Interesting thought experiment...

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