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Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

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Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#181

I personally lost $6000 dollars, is there any way I could prove that I was a victim and get my crypto back?

You sent $6k in bitcoin to Elon Musk because you thought he'd give you $12k back?

Assuming this isn't a joke, consider that $6k a lesson to not be such a gullible mark.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#182

Wasn't there inside help? I read several articles saying that there was. Any of those insiders charged? Twitter is in a bind. If there was no inside help, that says their security is pretty lax. If there was inside help, why have they not identified or named them.

Unless there's additional info I didn't see, the "inside help" theory came from the fact that they had images of the internal dashboards. That doesn't necessarily indicate voluntary inside help (they may have found a hole in Twitter's internet / intranet firewall, or they may have spear-phished a service team member's credentials).

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#183
post #140
post #131

Hitting a 17yo with 30 felony charges feels a bit steep to me. Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? If a 17yo could do it, I'm sure a nation state could do it.

The age of the attacker is irrelevant to Twitter's role in this story. However your underlying point still stands. If we want these types of attacks to stop, we can't just let all these companies off with a public embarrassment being the primary punishment. At a certain point we have to start calling it negligence when companies fall for these attacks and fail to have proper precautions in place to prevent them.

From memory, I recall the FBI did a study, and found that half of their employees would plug in a USB drive that they found on the ground in the parking lot. After training, that number was reduced to a quarter. If a security-focused government police agency is so vulnerable, it is unreasonable to expect perfection from a (less paranoid) company.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means they're tracking US visitors in ways intrusive enough to be illegal in Europe, yes.

Only if you enable javascript. This is exactly equivalent to opening every email attachment you receive. It's absurd this is considered the norm. You can take individual responsibility and disable JS by default. Also, don't visit sites that you disagree with. This is much more ethical than the European choice to bring in people with guns to coerce sites into behaving how they want. It's easy to understand why interna…

> You can take individual responsibility and disable JS by default.

Sure, you try explaining that to the general public, and why most of the sites they visit don't work anymore. It's hard enough to manage as a techie. This is the same argument snake oil purveyors use to complain about health and safety regulations, and it's silly for the same reasons.

> This is much more ethical than the European choice to bring in people with guns to coerce sites into behaving how they want.

Which GDPR violations have been met with armed agents?

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#185
post #13

Wonder when we'll get details on how he was actually able to do this - like how he got access to the internal tools, how did he succeed in social engineering, etc

They did provide a little detail so far [1].

> Hackers called a “small number” of employees in a phone spearphishing scheme, Twitter tweeted from its support account... The hackers were able to access some internal tools from the initial targeted employees and then learned specifically who had access to account support controls and targeted them next.

One likely scenario is they got access to the lower level employee's Slack account or similar and used it to impersonate and successfully find/phish the employee with the access.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/30/twitter...

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#186
post #137
post #131

Hitting a 17yo with 30 felony charges feels a bit steep to me. Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? If a 17yo could do it, I'm sure a nation state could do it.

What does the 17yo have to do with it? Would it be different for an 18yo?

In the United States, we generally consider minors who commit crimes to be a different class of criminal than people above 18. We do this because (AFAICT), there's a sort of societal agreement that wisdom/maturity is a logarithmic curve that begins to flatten in the late teens and 18 was picked as a legal threshold.

So if a 2 year old, 8 year old and 18 year old all shoot and kill someone, we prescribe much different levels of punishment based on their relative maturity. Sometimes, prosecutors decide to charge minors "as an adult" based on their behavior (Google for "X year old charged as adult" for examples). I assume that's what they're doing here.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#187
post #131

Hitting a 17yo with 30 felony charges feels a bit steep to me. Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? If a 17yo could do it, I'm sure a nation state could do it.

> Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? 200 Million Americans could drive a car into a crowd. That doesn't make it any less bad for someone to do.

That is not the point that the parent comment is making, though.

It's not whether it's bad for someone to commit this crime, it's whether Twitter should be held liable for such poor security practices that a 17 year old can hack them.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#188
post #131

Hitting a 17yo with 30 felony charges feels a bit steep to me. Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? If a 17yo could do it, I'm sure a nation state could do it.

> Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? Is the suggestion that if your security is weak, at least some of the blame goes to the hacked? If your home security is weak, should we grant more leniency to a burglar? The insurance company should be the one to punish the riski…

Not home security, but I'm of the opinion this should apply for businesses and public places in some case. For instance, I usually carry a gun on me. If I go into the court house or a concert venue I'm prohibited from doing that. IMO they have now assumed a level of liability to provide a reasonable level of effective security and they're negligent if they don't and I'm injured or kill because of a mass shooting anyway because they didn't enforce their own policies.

Speaking of guns, it's actually also not unheard of for people to be partly responsible for crimes committed with guns that were stolen from them, even in their home. You have something dangerous, like a network that has become a de facto platform for government officials, then yeah: you have a responsibility to take reasonable preventative measures too.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#189
post #131

Hitting a 17yo with 30 felony charges feels a bit steep to me. Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? If a 17yo could do it, I'm sure a nation state could do it.

> Also should any repercussions be considered against Twitter that a 17yo was able to gain access to the private messages of potentially some of the most important individuals in the world? 200 Million Americans could drive a car into a crowd. That doesn't make it any less bad for someone to do.

[deleted]

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean the US visitors data is not protected? Or no resources to add a cookie banner?

It means they're not complying with European Union laws. Whether you think complying with a law is synonymous with protection, or security or privacy is up to your experience and worldview.

Or that they don’t know if they are complying.
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