Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't yet gone after the most prominent Twitter user.
Don't worry guys I just changed my password.
Shame you had to retire the old one, but "hunter3" does have a nice and modern ring to it.
Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
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Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#462Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#463Is it just me, or does this seem suspiciously poorly thought out? Perhaps there is a second stage involving stock plays. The BTC thing might be a diversion. Or we are incredibly lucky and the exploit was found by people with really bad foresight and imagination.
Stock plays would be much easier to detect and trace.
It's true, but maybe not impossible to pull off. The exploit could've been purchased by people deeply connected and organized. If you split your investment and divert it enough, it will be impossible to differentiate from all the other incoming sales tomorrow.
There are so many smarter moves that probably could have been made though. The upside of this one is that we'll keep speculating for a good while (maybe forever) if it wasn't just a stupid crypto scam attempt after all.
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#464Given how huge this hack is, and how little the BTC reward is going to be, I'm tempting to think this is either: - a test of a new hacking system - a demonstration to a big client - a first shot to threat some entity - a diversion while they get the real loot And that the BTC messages are just a way to justify it so it looks like a simple scam. Such a hack is worth way, WAY more than the few BTC it could bring.
I think its mostly test of miners - prominent group of tech-related personas have been hacked, so I wonder if they end up asking miners not to validate/approve the list of incoming/outgoing transactions. If they choose to minimize priority of this transactions, they may get delayed over 14 days and eventually fell off a block as never processed bitcoins. Then spender gets their money back. In 14 days they may realize it was a scam. They probably already did!
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#465Given how huge this hack is, and how little the BTC reward is going to be, I'm tempting to think this is either: - a test of a new hacking system - a demonstration to a big client - a first shot to threat some entity - a diversion while they get the real loot And that the BTC messages are just a way to justify it so it looks like a simple scam. Such a hack is worth way, WAY more than the few BTC it could bring.
Or a distraction while a bigger hack is going on?
Without knowing what they have access to, it's hard to tell.
If it's a third party API key with special priviledged that they hacked, the potential harm is limited.
If they have access to the full system, they could be sending millions of ghost messages to some part of the population right now to get them to do something while we all watch the BTC show:
- scam them
- get them infected to gather a massive bot net
- make them very angry and start some kind of civil unrest in a specific part of the world
- cover a currently happening terrible event somewhere so that we don't learn about it too soon because twitter is the faster medium for that
At this point I realize how critical twitter has became to shape the way we view the world, and govs should worry a lot that this can be happening and act on it quickly.
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#466With 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!
If they had full access to Twitter’s backend, they probably would be tweeting from accounts like @POTUS or @jack. But this seems like they have access to limited accounts. Most likely gained access to a third party service that allows you to manage your tweets? Edit: they tweeted from the twitter support account. Just wow. They might have actually gotten into Twitter’s systems. Edit 2: To expand on my edit above, I s…
Donald Trump was Tweeting in Farsi earlier, I was seriously on the fence about whether that was a genuine tweet.
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse? How about POTUS declares war on China thru twitter? OMG, I just realized how dumb that would have been to say back in 2016. But these days?
That's assuming Tweets actually serve an actual diplomatic function and are not merely marketing/propaganda for voters. (Also POTUS is not authorized to declare any wars btw.)
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Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#468Twitter should suspend the entire platform until they can credibly fix this and prevent it in the future. An attacker could drop AMZN stock by 10% in minutes with just the wrong tweet from Bezos.
Many powerful actors, including state actors, would love to see Twitter, as a political instrument, go away. It could even be our own, or a dissident group within our own, IC. If someone can get a presidential candidate and an ex-president's twitter account to say what they want, then that is pretty much the end of Twitter as a political tool.
I hadn't really considered that the attack might be against Twitter, the corporation, itself. The BTC thing is obviously too stupid to be the objective, but if you hate Twitter, then would there be a better way to teardown the entire site than doing something like this?
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
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Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse? How about POTUS declares war on China thru twitter? OMG, I just realized how dumb that would have been to say back in 2016. But these days?
This hack could absolutely get people killed. There are several tweets I can think of from POTUS that would begin immediate military mobilization from an unfriendly country.
That’s a scenario I find much less likely than the hundreds of Trump tweets that would set off domestic violence within minutes.
If Trump would tweet what the fringe communities want to hear (example: Trump tweets that state law enforcement have started rounding up people with Hawaii shirts and confiscating their weapons and should be seen as enemy combatants and engaged on sight. That would turn ugly very quickly).
A well crafted tweet about e.g the Taliban could easily put US soldiers abroad in harms way immediately too.