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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

#211
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…

Yeah, I would have guessed a platform like Twitter would have anti-abuse systems with at least term filters.

At this point I'd advocate for a huge red button or a gong that someone can smash and it just halts the platform

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#212

With so many accounts compromised, the hackers might actually have full access to Twitter's backend. The postmortem would be very interesting. I'll be looking forward to it. Imagine if the hackers timed the intrusion during github outage, and twitter's employees can't deploy a fix for the exploit fast enough because github was down!

Maybe a front end/OAuth issue - those are not uncommon either. Will be interesting to learn more.

Also begs the question, who is liable in such cases....

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#213

With so many accounts compromised, the hackers might actually have full access to Twitter's backend. The postmortem would be very interesting. I'll be looking forward to it. Imagine if the hackers timed the intrusion during github outage, and twitter's employees can't deploy a fix for the exploit fast enough because github was down!

probably a social media manager api keys

I can't see that bill gates, Elon musk and every cryptocurrency channel using the same manager. This looks like something closer to a Twitter hack than an intermediary, especially with the the reposting after deletion.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#215
post #94
post #76

Uber has been hacked as well. At this point, they can get any high profile Twitter user. EDIT: You know this is a coordinated Twitter hack when they have Apple's account hacked [0]. https://twitter.com/Apple/status/1283506278707408900

They haven't yet gone after the most prominent Twitter user.

One wonders if that specific account has some unique exemption in the Twitter code to specifically deal with it.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#216

My bet is on one of those social media managers like Hootsuite/Social Blade/Buffer getting hacked.

Probably not. A lot of accounts with hardly any followers are also tweeting the scam. Search the bitcoin address to see the tweets in real time.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#217
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…

[deleted]

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#218
post #29

So many accounts are affected, this seems to be a system-level hack rather than a compromise of individual accounts. Someone has found a way to post a tweet from any account they like?

You would think they would do something with Trump if it was arbitrary accounts. But maybe his has additional protections

They're clearly trying to avoid the risk of being tracked. For example, they could have done stock manipulation and made more money. Trump is someone with the power and craziness to spend a hundred million tracking you down and literally dropping bombs on your head. So it'd be poor risk management to go after his account.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#220

No Trump?

I like to imagine that it would trigger some kind of alarm at the CIA/NSA/FBI and have drones surrounding the person's house within a few hours?

Surely a hack of this magnitude would be on the radar of many of those agencies already.
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