Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?

krebsonsecurity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 536 posts

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

#411

Post by celticninja »

judge2020 wrote: post #313
peterlk wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is a bit confusing to me. Have we moved past layered security for some reason? The purpose of a VPN was never supposed to be the authentication layer to internal services. It's just a layer of security that makes it more difficult to carry out some types of attacks; thus increasing security defenses of an organization. Assuming that it has been breached is good practice, but doesn't mean that there's no p…

The issue is that, for any company without thousands of employees (heck, probably even some of these are guilty), the VPN is often the only barrier to the entire network. The BeyondCorp model makes you explicitly specify "John can access support.corp.com but not admin.corp.com", while setting up these explicit checks is the exception for VPN-based access, not the norm (and sometimes it isn't even done right - eg. rel…

In short:

VPN can be a security tool, as long as it is not your only security tool.

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

#412

Post by rm445 »

amatecha wrote: post #79
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,…

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.

What you're saying makes some sense - a television broadcast, say, requires effort from a lot of people to produce - and, previously, expensive special equipment to broadcast, though now TV content is often streamed over the web - so it has a level of credibility, the TV news at least can't be spoofed by one person in their bedroom on the other side of the world. (Note that deepfakes may be changing this).

But the world we live in is full of "web services that let people post whatever they want at any time". News from Twitter may be weird but many people want to get their news from the BBC website, or the New York Times, or Reuters or whatever. Or their own government's websites. Just web services that people post from - presumably with levels of editing and checking but all presumably with security flaws that could bypass them.

It's not clear exactly what you're asking for. A technological solution involving careful checking of cryptographic signatures? Or some sort of super-expensive-to-spoof source of all important news?

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

#414

Post by reactchain »

Forbo wrote: post #101
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels a very, very small step away from doxxing to me. What small step is that? Looks like a textbook case of doxxing to me.

This isn't his first time doing it, either. https://itwire.com/security/infosec-researchers-slam-ex-wapo...

That is just embarrassingly petty - I've just lost a little more respect for the guy.

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

#415

Post by reactchain »

cbzoiav wrote: post #391
glitchc wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. The rest of the world doesn’t take Twitter as seriously as Americans do. And truth be told, Americans shouldn’t take it seriously either. The platform derives power from the audience. Stop giving it your power.

Financial markets do. Where acting faster than your competition is essential you don't have a lot of choice. As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets (nobody is going to go to war over a tweet without fact checking it) but access to private messages is an entirely different story.

> As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets

Depends how tense the situation already was. A well-timed tweet could be enough to tip things over the edge if both sides were already on the edge, and I don't think we're too far away from that.

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

#416

Post by baxtr »

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,…

How fast did the markets recover back in 2013?

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

#417

Post by slightwinder »

lifeformed wrote: post #260
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nothing would happend from this. China and other might raise their alarm, but nobody would raise their own weapons without proof for something really happning outside of twitter.

In the meanwhile Trump would appear after some minutes on TV, youtube, and whatever other channel they have around, proofing that he is not sending the tweets, while twitter would do their stuff.

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

#418

Post by silasdavis »

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.

It depends how close to war the belligerents are before such tweets.

Could a Trump tweet (real or fake) cause a pivotal escalation in a series or escalations leading to war? I think probably yes.

Post reply on HN