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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

#271

Post by shadowgovt »

Shared404 wrote: post #239
varenc wrote: post #172

> "Washington DC Field Office Cyber Crimes Unit analyzed the blockchain and de-anonymized bitcoin transactions allowing for the identification of two different hackers"

Got to love government knowledge of tech. This is the set of people that legislators listen to. I think we may be screwed.

I'm not sure what your criticism of the quote means here. The biggest weakness of BTC for criminal enterprise is the fact that every transaction must be logged to a global public ledger. The hard part is aligning the public keys with private keys, but if you have enough additional information (such as, say, the private keys' owners sitting in a prison cell and the private keys themselves flayed out of their unencrypted hard drives), it's trivial to prove the money flowed from one user to another.

The quote seems accurate.

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

#272

Post by chrononaut »

webkike wrote: post #252
justchilly wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that apply to criminals of all ages, based on their intelligence / mental maturity? Plenty of incarcerated 18+ adults with less brainpower than this guy were deemed responsible for their actions.

I think there are some arguments here to be made about the development of the prefrontal cortex. You may not be as “intelligent” as someone who is 17, but if you’re over the age of 25 your decision making capabilities are likely much much better. There’s a lot of evidence to support this. I will present my own anecdotal evidence because hacker news loves that stuff. I acutely felt my decision making improve a few mon…

> I acutely felt my decision making improve a few months before I turned twenty five. It hit me like a wave, and reflecting on my past decisions felt like looking at the actions of a completely different person.

I don't know if this actually exists, but I experienced something similar: Starting at around 17 I decided to ask myself at every birthday whether I thought I was more mature as a person than the year before, which I think relates to proper and holistic decision making. I kept saying "yes" to this question until I was 24.

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

#273

Post by kodt »

gregschlom wrote: post #187
nordsieck wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is a 17 year old hacking them really proof of worse security than say a 30 year old?

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

#275

Post by gav »

nickff wrote: post #183
slg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Security training improves security but it doesn't get close to stopping 100% of attacks.

I know it's obvious, but it feels like it's only obvious to those that think about security. It's the same reason that putting your developers through a yearly OWASP Top 10 secure coding course isn't going to get you to 100% secure code.

Locking down systems seems draconian, but it's the only way:

- Disabling USB storage

- Moving away from passwords to hardware authentication

- Strong controls on internet access

- Stop incoming calls from reaching most employees. Better: take away phones altogether

And so on.

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

#276

Post by shadowgovt »

cordite wrote: post #214
alexander1100 wrote: post #170

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

Good luck. This is how bitcoin works. You send value to somewhere else of your will. There is no outside party here.

Practically speaking, at this point the government is probably in possession of the private keys and could authorize reverse transactions to restore the stolen crypto.

The larger question is a question of policy and law... Does the government even consider entries in a blockchain ledger to be "returnable stolen property?"

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

#277

Post by SahAssar »

alexander1100 wrote: post #257
SahAssar wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transactions are not reversible by legal authority in bitcoin, only by the receiving party willingly doing the transaction in reverse. What you are talking about is establishing reputability, not about refund-ability or the ability of authorities to reverse illicit transactions. You can see that as a feature of bitcoin or not, but if you want protections from a system you need to act within that system.

I am saying I know I made a mistake and if they truly caught those who are responsible, then I don't see why they won't be able to get access to the stolen funds. My eth is in that collection of stolen funds. I'd rather prove it's mine and have the government return it to me vs them auctioning it off.

I understand what you are saying, and I'm sorry you are in this situation. But I can also see that because you acted outside of the reach of the legal system then there is less chance of it being able to help you.

Sorry if I'm being heartless here but I'd also argue that the funds were not stolen, they were given in a system that provides almost no legal recourse.

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

#278

Post by ggggtez »

Imagine a 17 year old robs a bank and steal 100k from the savings accounts of random people.

Or a 17 year old steals a couple of cars from random people off the street...

The crime is not breaking into Twitter. The crime is theft. Twitter didn't steal that money, this guy did. Let's not pretend the internet is a magical land without consequences.

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

#279

Post by banana_giraffe »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #158
VonBlue wrote: post #145

Hold on... how could they have de-anonymized the blockchain transactions? That seems.. false

All transactions are public on the Bitcoin blockchain. I haven't followed the wallets, but it's possible that they tried to cash out on an exchange and got caught. Or they were initially found via other means and a search of their computers found the corresponding wallet.dat files.

Yeah, they used Coinbase, and Coinbase is of course willing to respond to warrants.

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

#280

Post by Shared404 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #271
Shared404 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got to love government knowledge of tech. This is the set of people that legislators listen to. I think we may be screwed.

I'm not sure what your criticism of the quote means here. The biggest weakness of BTC for criminal enterprise is the fact that every transaction must be logged to a global public ledger. The hard part is aligning the public keys with private keys, but if you have enough additional information (such as, say, the private keys' owners sitting in a prison cell and the private keys themselves flayed out of their unencrypt…

I know the quote was accurate. I thought it was common knowledge that bitcoin is not anonymous, therefore making "de-anonymized the bitcoin transactions" a bit of an overstatement.
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