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Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

krebsonsecurity.com

171–180 of 536 posts

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#171

I think people are still severely under-estimating how dangerous this was. Back in 2013 when The Associated Press was hacked with a tweet of "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured" and erased $136 billion in equity market value: Archive: http://archive.is/8lCMV https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/04/23... This twitter hack could have literally destroyed economies,…

I really think that world leaders twitter accounts should be on completely separate systems from the twitter world. Like a twitter.gov service. It should be insanely locked down, and twitter employees don't have access to it unless they are certified and thoroughly trained. It's just become that important to the stock market and world policy.

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#173
post #167

I don’t really think he should be naming who his unnamed sources “think” is behind an attack on this scale, especially with full name, city of origin, Instagram, suggested current location, age, etc. It feels a very, very small step away from doxxing to me. Added to which he has somebody in the comments essentially calling for the death penalty over this. If he has this personal information and evidence, pass it to t…

I never understood the whole doxing thing... the actions you take in this world are real. You can't take them back. You don't get to be anonymous just because you wish to be or because you frequent hacker sub-cults where doxing is some holy transgression. Bad op sec is bad op sec. Nothing more, nothing less. If Krebs got it wrong, well, he can suffer the consequences of that, too.

>If Krebs got it wrong, well, he can suffer the consequences of that, too.

And, if he got it wrong, the innocent person he doxxed has to suffer the (potentially much more harsh) consequences of someone else's irresponsible actions. While Krebs begins working on his next story, and if we're lucky, posts an "oopsie" comment.

How can you justify that as okay?

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#174
post #167

I don’t really think he should be naming who his unnamed sources “think” is behind an attack on this scale, especially with full name, city of origin, Instagram, suggested current location, age, etc. It feels a very, very small step away from doxxing to me. Added to which he has somebody in the comments essentially calling for the death penalty over this. If he has this personal information and evidence, pass it to t…

I never understood the whole doxing thing... the actions you take in this world are real. You can't take them back. You don't get to be anonymous just because you wish to be or because you frequent hacker sub-cults where doxing is some holy transgression. Bad op sec is bad op sec. Nothing more, nothing less. If Krebs got it wrong, well, he can suffer the consequences of that, too.

The problem is that the named person will also suffer if Krebs got it wrong. Furthermore it isn't uncommon these days for people to overreact and mob up against the person. We have a justice system to deal with this. We shouldn't have thousands of random people on the internet punishing them based on loose evidence.

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#175
post #158
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said for radio, whether Orson Wells "Alien Invasion" broadcast or the multitude of April 1st jokes that got out of hand.

Apparently the "fallout" was an exaggeration that Orson went along with because it gave him more publicity. From the Wikipedia: >"The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. ... Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discr…

Thank you for sharing! My father used to tell me about this story. It's good to know it's apocryphal.

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#176
I'm sure it's been said before, but I just continue to be surprised that the admin panel used to carry out this attack wasn't locked behind a VPN.

I've worked for multiple fully-remote companies that were easily able to protect tools like this from the outside world.

The company I currently work for (fully remote) has tons of internal services that our engineers (who we trust) can access as needed in order to debug problems and help our clients. None of it is accessible from the Internet.

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#177
post #167

I don’t really think he should be naming who his unnamed sources “think” is behind an attack on this scale, especially with full name, city of origin, Instagram, suggested current location, age, etc. It feels a very, very small step away from doxxing to me. Added to which he has somebody in the comments essentially calling for the death penalty over this. If he has this personal information and evidence, pass it to t…

I never understood the whole doxing thing... the actions you take in this world are real. You can't take them back. You don't get to be anonymous just because you wish to be or because you frequent hacker sub-cults where doxing is some holy transgression. Bad op sec is bad op sec. Nothing more, nothing less. If Krebs got it wrong, well, he can suffer the consequences of that, too.

Like a lot of terms doxing can mean different things. Sometimes it means holding people accountable and sometimes it means releasing the home address and workplace of a person misidentified as a wrongdoer by an internet mob.

A recent example was the biker misidentified as a man who assaulted a child putting up posters.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52978880

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#179

I think people are still severely under-estimating how dangerous this was. Back in 2013 when The Associated Press was hacked with a tweet of "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured" and erased $136 billion in equity market value: Archive: http://archive.is/8lCMV https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/04/23... This twitter hack could have literally destroyed economies,…

It's almost as if web services that let people post whatever they want at any time, vulnerable to whatever security flaws may be present, shouldn't be used as a reliable source for up-to-the-minute information about literally anything important at all.

Its almost as if we shouldn't centralize such communication in a single giant private corporation.

Re: Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

#180
post #167

I don’t really think he should be naming who his unnamed sources “think” is behind an attack on this scale, especially with full name, city of origin, Instagram, suggested current location, age, etc. It feels a very, very small step away from doxxing to me. Added to which he has somebody in the comments essentially calling for the death penalty over this. If he has this personal information and evidence, pass it to t…

I never understood the whole doxing thing... the actions you take in this world are real. You can't take them back. You don't get to be anonymous just because you wish to be or because you frequent hacker sub-cults where doxing is some holy transgression. Bad op sec is bad op sec. Nothing more, nothing less. If Krebs got it wrong, well, he can suffer the consequences of that, too.

The actions you take in this world are real yes, but the scale at which the internet enables retribution is unprecedented. If you punch someone in the street maybe three people will beat you up. If you punch someone online, tens of thousands of people might pile on and start kicking.
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