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Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

krebsonsecurity.com

251–260 of 536 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it was dangerous, but nothing is “erased” if that market valuation is restored a few minutes later

That's not true. Many people have auto-sell / buy triggers set up when something drops below a value.

I don't know about many. I don't know of any retail investors that do, and if I did I would have guessed that they'd be buying when prices drop, not selling.

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

#252

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.

I believe they are referring to the fact that they could have theoretically tweeted the wrong thing from the wrong account that could have caused a war. It isn't extremely likely but not comically unrealistic. Definitely within the realm of possibility.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly. The only reason this would be stupid is because Bitcoin has rapidly been centralizing. I suspect many exchanges might start blacklisting any wallet that has any transactions from this wallet. On the other hand, they can’t really do that. At that point the attackers would be able to poison any wallet just by sending a small amount of BTC to it. Therefore it seems like the only penalty is that they’d have to…

Random, totally not thought all the way through, idea. Could a decentralized nullifier be put in the blockchain? Allow the consensus algorithm to "vote" for when an address should be marked as invalid and miners would reject transactions with it. It would work by someone submitting an "anti-coin" transaction and wagering their own coin. Miners would provide PoW to confirm the transaction but instead of the miners col…

You can do this on a technical level but on a practical one it creates pathways for abuse which defeat much of the purpose of using crypto in the first place.

And attackers like the one in the twitter attack would just choose to use cryptocurrencies where this isn't possible.

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

#254
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.

People are not looking for trusted sources of knowledge. They are looking for entertainment.

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

#255
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the hacked could have made more if they instead used Musk's Twitter account for something like that while shorting Tesla.

Or used a more believable scam? They took over coinbase’s Twitter. They could have announced some new trading system and to reserve your spot in the line for the beta deposit $100 worth of bitcoin to this address.

If bitcoin cult knew how to leverage technology into useful applications, they wouldn't be in......bitcoin

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

#256

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 think people are still severely under-estimating how dangerous this was.

No they don't.

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

#257

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,…

This. It almost seems like a proof of concept for someone selling services to a bigger player, using the Bitcoin angle as a smokescreen. Something like this right before the election or after could wreak havoc if targeted to the right accounts. I imagine certain state sponsors would pay handsomely for that.

That was my thought as well. A big stunt to show they can take over some of the largest names on Twitter/world as a proof of concept. Think of what they can do if they fan this out at scale to millions of normal accounts.

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

#258
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…

I loved to ask my grandmother about this because she recalled listening to the original broadcast. She said the station would take commercial breaks to interrupt the story, and they reminded listeners it was a fictitious broadcast when taking these breaks. She didn't believe that anyone could be fooled by it, at least not to the extent that was reported.

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

#259
post #200

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.

Who says its an antipattern? VPN Authentication is additional to authentication on internal systems. VPN is a requirement in most security frameworks like NIST.

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

#260

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.

Here's how I think it could be done:

Get Trump's account, and tweet something like, "I've ordered a NUCLEAR STRIKE on China! The missiles are already in the air. The DEEP STATE is trying to take me out. They will try to silence me and delete these tweets and use deep fakes to say this was a hoax! The storm is here, Q is real, it's time to take up arms and kill democrats."

Then continue tweeting escalating things over the next half hour (since apparently the hackers couldn't be stopped for a while).

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