Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack • Hacker News Board

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

#641

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:15 AM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #507

jacquesm wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a surprise to you but criminals are usually stupid. If they were smart you wouldn't realize they are there at all. Think about it: this idiot had access at a level that nation states secret services can only dream of and went for $100K in lousy bitcoins.

I know, which is why it doesn't make sense. If you're so stupid how can you social engineer your way into Twitter?

Because at Twitter a couple of people did not pay attention. Social engineering is the very low hanging fruit of hacking. People are so much more vulnerable than well designed systems, this has been proven over and over again.

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

#642

Post by 29athrowaway » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:20 AM UTC

Taek wrote: 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.

He pissed off the wrong people.

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

#643

Post by entropea » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #542

reitzensteinm wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentences should run concurrently. 4 years for setting a car on fire is not unreasonable, although maybe a little harsh depending on priors. It's a dangerous thing to do. But setting five cars on fire is not particularly worse than setting one car on fire.

Setting five police cars on fire is an act of domestic terrorism. That's not in any way a normal protest action.. That's what the prosecutor will argue.

I remember when terrorism was blowing up a building injuring almost 1000 people and killing countless more, or crashing airplanes into two buildings, killing 3000 and injuring countless more. Burning police cars that ended in not even an injury is a felony, but terrorism? No way.

I really wish people would stop lowering the bar for what's called terrorism. It's a very dangerous slope.

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

#644

Post by dkersten » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:34 AM UTC

jb775 wrote: post #543

dkersten wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock idea is dumb, in my opinion, because there were safer (no SEC) ways that required less capital and didn't require fancy trade accounts. For example: buy up a load of super cheap shitcoins. Can be done for under $100. Then tweet from an exchange like Binance that they will shortly be listing said shitcoin. Watch the price go up, sell. Or, with a bit more money, short one of the cryptocurrencies, tweet from a…

How exactly do you short a specific cryptocurrency?

You go on Binance, BitMEX, Bybit, FTX, Phemex or any other exchange that offers futures or perpetual swaps that track the bitcoin (or whatever) price. This is basic stuff. You can create a BitMEX account in minutes, load some bitcoin in and short with 100x leverage with minimal time or effort, just need a small amount of bitcoin to trade with.

He could have done the scam on eg Elon Musks amount to get some bitcoin and then pulled this scam on an exchange using the money from the first scam

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

#645

Post by forgotmypw17 » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:36 AM UTC

                      \/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/

                                      by

                               +++The Mentor+++

                          Written on January 8, 1986

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

        Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.  "Teenager

Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike.

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

#646

Post by dkersten » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

DabbyDabberson wrote: post #500

dkersten wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock idea is dumb, in my opinion, because there were safer (no SEC) ways that required less capital and didn't require fancy trade accounts. For example: buy up a load of super cheap shitcoins. Can be done for under $100. Then tweet from an exchange like Binance that they will shortly be listing said shitcoin. Watch the price go up, sell. Or, with a bit more money, short one of the cryptocurrencies, tweet from a…

if you're someone whose regularly traded 10s of thousands of certain stocks over the last few years, it would be nearly impossible for them to detect a $100k profit from stock manipulation. especially a high volume stock like TSLA

If you’re someone who regularly trades you already have money and are unlikely to be hacking twitter accounts. Certainly a 17 year old isn’t going to be in that category.

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

#647

Post by dividedbyzero » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #348

Taek wrote: 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.

Adding repercussions to the targets would be a mistake in my opinion - that would be very antitransparency as they would be encouraged to be willfully blind to cover their own asses. "Look it is clearly just the fault that these dumbass rich people didn't secure their passwords properly. Password reset logs? Why on earth would we keep those?" Personally I suspect the security of the systems could be improved best ove…

I kind of like that idea, but defining the rules and boundaries would be really hard, and I'm not sure if the cure wouldn't be much worse than the disease, overall, for just blanket legalizing hacking.

Like, how far am I allowed to go?

Deface somecompany.com? Deface it to say "We're going out of business"? Deface it to show the rotten.com best-of?

Can I just delete somecompany.com's customer database? Can I dump and download before I delete? Can I delete backups? Can I tamper with backup mechanisms, set a time bomb for in seven days when all rotating online backups are corrupted, destroy everything? How nefarious exactly am I allowed to be? After all, anyone without regular offline backups deserves to get hit, don't they?

Can I sell that database dump, or at least show it to others? Can I take a peek at blueprints I find on some network share? Can I have look into that User\ List.xslx file I find? Can I access users' private data? May I keep Beyonce's nudes? Can I use the information I find for personal gain, or even to gain an upper hand over a competitor?

Can I play with industrial automation software if I get in that far (you definitely would, sometimes)? What if I don't even realize this super outdated Windows box is controlling some kind of machinery and people get harmed when I inadvertently break something?

Can I attack healthcare providers? Can I attack banks?

Can I use any minutes-old zero-day disclosed by some hackfluencer on his Youtube channel, even if noone reasonably could have reacted to that so quickly?

I guess we'd also see the hacking-for-prestige (or hacking for likes, nowadays?) sector to get much, much more sophisticated; that was happening already before it got outlawed where I live (not in the US), I'd expect that to surge.

That might lead to everyone below big corporation level virtually having to migrate everyting they can to cloud and serverless products, since I'd expect it to get increasingly harder and expensive to run your own bespoke infrastructure in a secure way and not get pwned 15 times a week by some Twitch hackfluencer. AWS may be able to have a fix for a zero day deployed in within the hour, but how many small companies (or individuals running services) could do the same?

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

#648

Post by ryanlol » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

camjohnson26 wrote: post #242

kolbe wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this bothers me to my core. Even the 22 year old hasn't developed a fully functional neocortex. I know it seems a little hypocritical of me for getting sad when this happens to a young programmer and not an inner city gang member, but it does. To pull off a hack like this is indicative of these kids being intelligent, risky and bold. Yeah, they went where they shouldn't, but I personally think these are the t…

That attitude is exactly the problem though. These kids getting hit with a 30 year sentence bothers those of us who relate, when the same thing happens to young black inner city kids every day. Plenty of them are just as intelligent, risky, and bold as these kids but we throw them in prison for the best parts of their life without a second thought.

> These kids getting hit with a 30 year sentence

They will not get hit with a 30 year sentence.

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

#649

Post by letier » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

hentrep wrote: post #117

montenegrohugo wrote: post #27

If this turns out to be true, then we can conclude two things: 1. It's incredible that the security of Twitter allows for a solitary 17-year old to gain full access to (any) account. 2. This also explains why the profit of the hack was 'only' ~$100k. Many speculated about how incredibly valuable such a hack could be and how much more a group could have profited from this hack. Using it for two hours of bitcoin scammi…

My initial thought was that the bitcoin move was a red herring. DMs associated with the compromised accounts could be very well worth much more than $100k.

https://twitter.com/twittersupport/status/128608813552531865... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/23/twitter-h...

"We believe that for up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox, including 1 elected official in the Netherlands."

You might be on to something.

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

#650

Post by Biganon » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 11:20 AM UTC

ImaCake wrote: post #630

totony wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but the consequences of this were pretty severe Can you elaborate on this? The consequences were mild at best, with people easily duped being duped and twitter having a (understandably) worse reputation.

Think of what this teenager could have done if he had hacked Trump's twitter, or any other current head of state. The best case scenario then is a diplomatic incident, the worst is war or genocide.

But then again he hasn't, so what's your point?