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Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#141

Post by jacquesm »

Jenya_ wrote: post #131
jacquesm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the tweet either because I can't see the context in which it was made. If there was any...

Tweet is addressed to several accounts, one of them is KyivIndependent which reports Ukraine related news. The tweet looks like a death wish from RU supporter.

So it wasn't as a reply to anything? Pretty weird. I'm about as far from a RU supporter as it gets, as my very extensive tweet history amply documents.

But it would be a pretty good way to discredit me.

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#142

Post by Kiro »

jacquesm wrote: post #118
Kiro wrote: post #80

tl;dr: OP was hacked but refuse to believe they were compromised by traditional means.

That is possible, but I have absolutely zero evidence for that at this point. I would either think someone successfully managed to social engineer Twitter into making an unauthorized change or that there is some other avenue besides the regular interface that allowed access to my account (so not protected by my password or session).

I see now that you are very prolific on HN, even being #2 on the Leaders list: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

So I guess your suspicions that there's more than meets the eye have more merit than if it would be a random poster. However, my initial reaction was still "what makes this different than any other hack?".

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#143

Post by jrootabega »

latchkey wrote: post #92
OJFord wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Twitter support it? SMS-only I think.

https://twitter.com/settings/account/login_verification Authentication app Use a mobile authentication app to get a verification code to enter every time you log in to Twitter. https://help.twitter.com/managing-your-account/two-factor-au... Update: they added Authenticator 2FA in 2017 and a security key in 2021.

Perhaps this has changed in the last few months, but you need a phone number configured to use TOTP 2FA even if you don't use SMS 2FA. It's bullshit.

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#144

Post by aurora72 »

jacquesm wrote: post #89
LightG wrote: post #85

With the greatest respect. Who cares? It's twitter. A cesspit, now run by raggety old billionaire on an ego trip. Don't like it. Leave and find somewhere better!

I care because I have about 11K followers there and apparently someone is able to write stuff that looks like I wrote it and that opens me up to all kinds of damage. So this may not be a 'big deal' to you but it is to me.

Whether you have 11k or 11m followers, you are owned by the Twictatour. Those 11k followers are too.

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#146

Post by latchkey »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
latchkey wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming at this point they want your number. It is not unreasonable to assume that this has been changed to the attackers number.

True, but they are still asking for it even now and they prefix it with the NL country code.

Easy enough to figure out NL, your phone number is in your HN profile.

Then, the hacker just gets a local number, which should be easy enough these days.

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#147

Post by jacquesm »

tobr wrote: post #140
jacquesm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why aren't you deleting the tweet? Because deleting it would remove the one bit of evidence that this happened and may well wipe out the data that would allow establishing how this was done. > What if someone got hold of your password somehow? Theoretically possible, practically not very likely for all kinds of reasons which I won't go into here but which you are going to have to take my word for. Let's just say th…

> Because deleting it would remove the one bit of evidence that this happened and may well wipe out the data that would allow establishing how this was done. It’s not clear from the post that you have the option to delete the tweet but are choosing not to. I think perhaps some of the confusion in this thread comes from that omission.

Fair point, will amend the blog post.

edit: added an extra paragraph at the end, thank you for the hint.

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#148

Post by tedivm »

jacquesm wrote: post #132
mort96 wrote: post #125

> Twitter believes that I should delete the Tweet (which I didn’t make in the first place) But... It's on your account. If Twitter's condition for re-instating the account is that you delete this tweet, and you have enough access to your account to be able to delete the tweet, why aren't you deleting the tweet? And: > Twitter is behaving wholly irresponsible here: there is absolutely no way that if my account was com…

> why aren't you deleting the tweet? Because deleting it would remove the one bit of evidence that this happened and may well wipe out the data that would allow establishing how this was done. > What if someone got hold of your password somehow? Theoretically possible, practically not very likely for all kinds of reasons which I won't go into here but which you are going to have to take my word for. Let's just say th…

> Because deleting it would remove the one bit of evidence that this happened and may well wipe out the data that would allow establishing how this was done.

That's not how computers work. You'll mark it as deleted and then the "deleted" column (or field or whatever) will turn from false to true. No forensic evidence will be lost.

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#149

Post by scarmig »

jacquesm wrote: post #132
mort96 wrote: post #125

> Twitter believes that I should delete the Tweet (which I didn’t make in the first place) But... It's on your account. If Twitter's condition for re-instating the account is that you delete this tweet, and you have enough access to your account to be able to delete the tweet, why aren't you deleting the tweet? And: > Twitter is behaving wholly irresponsible here: there is absolutely no way that if my account was com…

> why aren't you deleting the tweet? Because deleting it would remove the one bit of evidence that this happened and may well wipe out the data that would allow establishing how this was done. > What if someone got hold of your password somehow? Theoretically possible, practically not very likely for all kinds of reasons which I won't go into here but which you are going to have to take my word for. Let's just say th…

I do trust that you have better opsec than 99%+ of users and that you didn't write this tweet. But it seems incredible that an adversary would burn a Twitter vulnerability to post a near incoherent message from your account (which isn't particularly influential, as far as these things go). Even social engineering Twitter support seems like a really crappy effort/reward ratio.

What you're doing here makes sense, and if I were at Twitter I'd be trying to help you figure out exactly what happened, on the chance that there was a deeper compromise.

Re: Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

#150

Post by wfhordie »

jacquesm wrote: post #84
saghm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don’t know whether the author of the post actually wrote the tweet in question > It's in the title. Your claim that you didn't is in the title, sure. It doesn't sound like GP is convinced one way or another though.

That's entirely their problem. I don't write tweets like that, don't drink, don't get high (as another commenter suggested) and stand by my words. This is not something trivial to me, someone is apparently able to impersonate me on a platform with massive reach and that means that if this doesn't get resolved in a serious manner that Twitter is utterly dead to me. And that probably was the goal of whoever did this so…

And you could get unbanned by deleting the tweet, is that right?
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