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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?

#461

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

zestyping wrote: post #241
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He ordered it, and it was executed methodically with over a year of preparation. Everyone was on board, or at least enough people were convinced.

On the contrary, take what happened when Trump wanted to bomb Syria, and people basically didn't let him. Presidents, especially weak, un-respected ones like Trump, can't just do things like that.

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

#462

Post by pelliphant »

christoph wrote: post #54

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…

+1.

serious media outlets generally don't name suspects untill they are convicted.

This is a rule that we as a society have established after generations of experience with how media works.

Then we get "social media", and all the old rules get thrown out... So, how long will it take to reinvent the same rules for this new platform?

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

#463

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

computerex wrote: post #270
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The president has the power to deploy the armed forces abroad without the approval of congress for a period of time.

That's on paper.

Then there's reality. And in reality, not many people respect Trump and are willing to follow his orders. This happens constantly in the news. His own cabinet members openly work against him all the time.

Most recently consider how Mark Esper publically publicly rejected using the Insurrection Act, right over top of Trump.

Now you could say—what if we had some other president? Well, the same social rules would apply to that person as well. Even if they were incredibly charismatic and well-liked and respected, they'd need to clear many social and political hurdles before the airplanes took off.

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

#464

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

NateEag wrote: post #300
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A US president has the power to unilaterally launch the nuclear arsenal: https://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/trump-and-the-nuclear-c... Whether the military would actually carry out those orders when no one else has ICBMs in the air is debatable, but the president's defined role as the commander-in-chief and the sole arbiter of when to open the gates of hell on earth is not.

> Whether the military would actually carry out those orders when no one else has ICBMs in the air is debatable

It's not merely debatable, it's highly debatable. People aren't just going to launch nuclear weapons willy nilly, no matter who the president is, muchless for Donald J. Trump, who few people in his administration take seriously.

Trump couldn't even get Mark Esper to deploy troops domestically. Now imagine the hurdles he'd face trying to deploy troops to another country.

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

#465

Post by crtasm »

martinko wrote: post #370
crtasm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you don't even need to steal an account. When the Playstation 5 launch event was happening I searched for it on Youtube, clicked the top result and it turned out to be a scammer restreaming the real live event with graphics added saying Sony would double your BTC - just send to this address ___.

It was probably the top result, because the account the hacker was streaming from was a stolen high-profile account.

Good point, I hadn't considered that. Seems it was actually some hours after the real live event[0]. I spot a different channel using the same name[1] that still has a short scam video online from 3 weeks ago.

[0] https://decrypt.co/32102/scam-sony-playstation-5-reveal-even...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6KECoI7g1U

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

#466

Post by chki »

donkeyd wrote: post #406
lyx0 wrote: post #274

The thing I'm most concerned about is that if Brian Krebs is right and they had access to their DM's, that the very obvious crypto scam they ran was just a facade, some kind of distraction because they knew they would have been noticed, but the true goal were the DM's. Imagine a celebrity saying some 'not so politically correct' things to a friend in private 8 years ago, and now imagine this becoming public while the…

Why are you so concerned about some celebs being called out on stuff they said? To me, the most concerning is innocent people having lost money to a scammer, not some celebrity's public image being hurt by something they actually wrote.

I think the point was that a malicious actor might have power (via blackmail) over a famous/powerful person.

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

#467

Post by ivanche »

fredoliveira wrote: post #396
cjohansson wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true I think. Twitter is mostly a US thing

Consider your biases. 80% of twitter users are outside the US [0], [1]. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274565/monthly-active-in... [1]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/

Around 96% of world population is outside the US. Consider your biases indeed.

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

#468

Post by eternalban »

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.

Remedy is painfully obvious: make an example of Twitter and pass laws that holds platform operators liable. That should fix all sorts of security problems.

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

#469

Post by ubercow13 »

ivanche wrote: post #467
fredoliveira wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider your biases. 80% of twitter users are outside the US [0], [1]. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274565/monthly-active-in... [1]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/

Around 96% of world population is outside the US. Consider your biases indeed.

What about the internet-using population? Supposedly only 60% of the world uses the internet whereas almost all of the US population does

https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...

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

#470

Post by user5994461 »

ziddoap wrote: post #173
dcow wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you believe the story, the people who are pointed to were already being looked for for arrest. Don't buy the poor innocent narrative too quickly.

It just happens that their last actions affected powerful figures and the US government so they might actually be some real international effort to arrest them now.

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