Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

Post by Kaveren » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

rootsudo wrote: post #251

brokencode wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know anybody willing to pay over $150,000 for temporary access to Obama’s twitter account? I find this type of comment kind of naive and poorly thought out. Just because you’re a hacker doesn’t mean you know how to sell secrets to Russia, and trying to establish lines of communication like that are probably going to raise red flags with law enforcement. To be fair, the strategy of scamming for bitcoin was craz…

Cue the entire movie "Burn after reading." Kid had the whole attention of the world for a few minutes, could've walked away a billionaire, start WW3, casino royale stock trading - everything, anything - CREATIVELY there's so much that could've been done and it all fell down to a bitcoin scam that netted less that 150K (wallet shows about 128k.) That's a yearly salary of a help desk engineer on the west coast. --I'm n…

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #369

sneak wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking and entering requires breaking. Sending packets is peaceful speech.

Sending these particular packets was more akin to fraud. Should fraud be legalized?

Post by nickff » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #254

nickff wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you need processes in place to make sure a single person being careless cant do this much damage. There are low tech solutions that would greatly improve security[1], however the overhead this introduces is hard to justify in a world in which these breaches aren't that damaging to a company. We need to change incentives for companies by either mandating these security practices or implementing harmful repercussi…

Post by esoterica » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

dshep wrote: post #220

Trying to paint this 17-year old kid as a criminal mastermind strikes me as rather gross. I can see it as a kid doing it to see if he could, and using an obviously meme-worthy fake post that got out of hand. I think everyone has done some dumb things at this age without thinking about the consequences. If that is the case here, I hope this doesn't ruin the guys life.

Post by tantalor » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #353

indigochill wrote: post #306

I have an unrealistic idea (more of a thought experiment) that companies should face equal culpability to criminal hackers in attacks. After all, technically the way the hackers use systems /is/ authorized in a sense, even if the method of obtaining authorization is unconventional. Maybe this would get companies to pay more attention to securing their systems. From a certain perspective, Twitter is an accomplice to f…

Should we make homeowners equally criminally liable when burglars break in? Certainly if the homeowner had been less lax or obtained more security, that burglary could have been prevented.