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Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

krebsonsecurity.com

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

#241

Post by zestyping »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #207
kleiba wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Trump?

A president can’t just “start a war”, muchless order air strikes. dozens of people are involved. Donald Trump yells and hollers all the time and people send Jared to calm him down. There have already been documented instances of this in the Trump admin, and it wasn’t over tweets.

Of course he can. He ordered the assassination of Soleimani in Iraq that could very well have led to a war.

Wars are the result of a series of escalations. It doesn't take a lot to knock over the first domino.

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

#242

Post by alacombe »

dcow wrote: post #184
ziddoap wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Do you think Krebs got it wrong? But regardless, harassment is harassment. If the public starts harassing the dude, even if he is guilty, they're just as guilty of their own offenses. Two wrongs don't make a right.

> Do you think Krebs got it wrong?

This is irrelevant, how can you have a fair justice system if the mob has already condemned the defender.

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

#243

Post by shostack »

phs318u wrote: post #118
blisseyGo wrote: post #69

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,…

Agreed. This was most likely a "shot across the bow" by a state actor. I have no proof of this. But it's highly public nature would seem to argue against a black-hat commercial interest (e.g. proof of potential to a possible buyer) as it would/will draw too much scrutiny. Also, the crystal clear implication that the damage done could have been far worse, would seem to indicate someone was sending a message. From whom…

Could the entity who committed this attack verify that it was them via their Bitcoin wallet?

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

#244

Post by gsich »

xyst wrote: post #200
twodave wrote: post #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 p…

Internal networks only accessible via VPN is considered an anti-pattern now in terms of security. It puts authorization firmly on the VPN. If the account with VPN access is compromised, then the attacker has full access to these sensitive systems. This hack probably underscores the importance of zero trust. Although if the system is compromised from within (like this hack is) then there is not much you can do.

Nobody does that.

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

#245

Post by zestyping »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #197
blisseyGo wrote: post #69

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,…

People keep saying it could have started a war. Excuse me for being naive but come on—really? This is total sensationalism. What party wouldn’t verify something on twitter through diplomatic channels before going to war? Equity destruction: sure. War: no way.

War seems very possible.

Wars start from smaller conflicts, which come about through escalation of smaller conflicts, lies, or misunderstandings. I think all that is necessary to start a war is a geopolitical event of sufficient severity to provoke a retaliation; once the first retaliation happens, there is high risk of further escalation.

So the question is whether a deception on Twitter could trigger a real-world event significant enough to provoke a retaliation. It might be hard to do that with a single message, but they had access to multiple accounts. These tweets were stupidly obvious scams. You could create a huge amount of panic with a series of posts from different influential accounts if they were designed to be believable.

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

#246

Post by doingmyting »

hunter2_ wrote: post #204
dwd wrote: 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.

It's not feasible for every trusted source of knowledge to have their own radio station, so the sources utilize existing stations, and consumers have no choice but to tune into those stations. It's perfectly feasible for every trusted source of knowledge to run a web server, and they actually do it, so it's sad that consumers don't connect directly to those servers and instead use middlemen.

What prevents those trusted sources from being similarly hacked once they're now the main arbiters of important information? I'd even argue this may be more dangerous especially if tech and security are not their core focus.

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

#247

Post by IAmGraydon »

blisseyGo wrote: post #69

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,…

Destroyed economies? Started a war? The tiny effect on the market lasted less than 5 minutes. Your post is bordering on comical.

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

#250

Post by etxm »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #62
paxys wrote: post #58

It's bizarre to me that someone pulled off an account takeover of this magnitude and the end result was random people being scammed out of ~$100K in Bitcoin (that too allegedly). A single well-crafted Tweet from one of these accounts is probably worth more. Heck Twitter would have paid that much or more just in bug bounties for reporting this.

see this, from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860584 "No, you couldn't have made more money than the Twitter hacker" https://fortenf.org/e/security/2020/07/15/twitter-hack.html

Find nefarious politician’s new fixer, offer to post a deep fake of Biden from Biden’s account expressing grief at finding out his son had acted in bad faith and that he was withdrawing from the election.

Post deep fake from Gates account saying that he did create coronavirus and he’s going to release the antidote. No masks needed. Open the country up.

The chaos and distrust alone would be worth more than 100k.

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