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Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

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Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#171
post #7

Elon Musk as well. Tweets still up, saying "Feeling greatful, doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes." As of now, 121 people have sent cash totally more than 2.5BTC. Edit: Just seen @BillGates compromised as well, same bitcoin account. Edit 2: Elon's tweet seems to be getting removed, and then reposted again shortly after. About $40k…

> As of now, 121 people have sent cash totally more than 2.5BTC. Fool and his money are soon parted.

We don’t know how much of that is the attacker sending himself to make it look legit.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#173
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get the 2.5BTC number from? It's more like 1.3BTC by looking up the address on their website. https://bitref.com/bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wl... Edit: I stand corrected. Holy crap!

Those are both tiny sums anyway.

Right, total about $55k received so far. Big numbers, sure, but probably not worth the heat you'd receive with going after such prominent accounts.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#175
post #7

Elon Musk as well. Tweets still up, saying "Feeling greatful, doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes." As of now, 121 people have sent cash totally more than 2.5BTC. Edit: Just seen @BillGates compromised as well, same bitcoin account. Edit 2: Elon's tweet seems to be getting removed, and then reposted again shortly after. About $40k…

> As of now, 121 people have sent cash totally more than 2.5BTC. Fool and his money are soon parted.

Fools, or people doing it for the lols

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#176

Should Twitter start supporting cryptographically signed messages? In any case, I wonder about the legal ramifications of this kind of event, for Twitter and for the individuals that have been hacked.

There is no loosing in doing so: just put a padlock on verified mesages and show the signing key. If the message sounds fishy and it's not verified then you should start worrying.

We've had the technology to avoid these sort of issues for decades and it's a shame it's still largely unused. Yeah, I know the argument PGP usability is really bad but it doesn't mean Twitter or other network used as official channels can't provide their own friendly interface and start signing/verifying messages, they certainly have the resources.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#177
post #6

With the way that Elon tweets normally, someone could have done a lot of damage before anyone realized. Luckily markets have closed already.

There are quite a lot of trading bots that base their trades off high impact twitter accounts. I wonder how they would've reacted to this.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#178
post #7

Elon Musk as well. Tweets still up, saying "Feeling greatful, doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes." As of now, 121 people have sent cash totally more than 2.5BTC. Edit: Just seen @BillGates compromised as well, same bitcoin account. Edit 2: Elon's tweet seems to be getting removed, and then reposted again shortly after. About $40k…

Where did you get the 2.5BTC number from? It's more like 1.3BTC by looking up the address on their website. https://bitref.com/bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wl... Edit: I stand corrected. Holy crap!

[deleted]

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#179
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As of now, 121 people have sent cash totally more than 2.5BTC. Fool and his money are soon parted.

We don’t know how much of that is the attacker sending himself to make it look legit.

Yeah, but they're incurring transaction fees…

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#180
post #133

Just what kind of an operation is Twitter running here? It seems crazy that they don't have any kind of anti-abuse system in place that could just block tweets with this specific Bitcoin address or possibly tweets matching the regexp of any Bitcoin address. I.e. limit the damage and buy a couple of hours while they try to find the root cause. (Yes, yes, staged rollouts. But anti-abuse systems don't work by those rule…

If this exploit is deep enough, the attackers might be disabling the anti-abuse systems as well.
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