Hahah looks like it's getting closer: OAuth account takeover?
https://twitter.com/LiveOverflow/status/1283511782380908545
Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
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Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#702Tweet from TwitterDev team yesterday: https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1283068902331817990 > 2 days to go… #TwitterAPI https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1283433096780677122 > Thank you to all of you who have engaged with us and shared your feedback. Your input has been vital, and we’re committed to continuing these conversations with you. There’s so much more we’re doing to build a better #TwitterAPI… and Ea…
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Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#703Given 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.
Frankly, I expect the real prize to be the DMs used by the blue checks. Biden and Barack's DMs are worth much more than 100 grand.
Do they seem the type of people that would send anything sensitive over Twitter DMs? I'd imagine if anything at the very least they would use iMessage or some messaging app of that nature. Biden seems like the type of guy who relies on e-mail.
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#704Twitter 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.
They just disabled tweeting from verified accounts. Right now I have more power than Elon.
Honestly I'm kind of enjoying seeing what it is doing to my feed with only unverified accounts and verified retweets. Twitter hasn't been this much fun in months.
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or it's been exploited for months/years to read people's DMs and private accounts and they decided to burn it now mostly for lolz?
That would be so incredibly stupid. Burning a money machine of that magnitude for lulz? I don't think anyone would do that.
Purely speculation, but the exploit could be tied to the APIs that they are deprecating today. It's possible that this is simply a last hurrah
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#706This reminds me of Colin.
Back in 2013 when I was working at Sky News, the person responsible for the social media accounts (with millions of followers in total) stormed into a meeting: "Our Twitter account has been hacked".
This was at a time when many high-profile news Twitter accounts were hacked by so-called "electronic armies" who published damaging tweets. However in our case it was a single obscure "Colin was here" tweet.
We had recently built an internal endpoint in one of the backend apps that takes a string and publishes it straight to the main breaking news Twitter account. This was integrated with a custom UI tool that the news desk people used to quickly break a story across TV, Twitter, the website etc with one click.
I had a suspicion that this endpoint was how that tweet was published, but could not prove it. Many thoughts were going through my head.. “is this an internal job, or did someone hack our backend system and somehow figured this out etc.. “
We quickly returned to our desks, and straight away I greped our logs for "tweeting" as I developed that feature and was sure we logged that when the endpoint is called, but in the heat of the moment forgot that to “-i” as it the log message actually contained "Tweeting" (which cost us a few minutes). In the meantime there was panic around the business, people were putting out PR statements just in case it was a real hack, the tweet was deleted etc.
Finally, with help from colleagues, we tracked down a "Tweeting" log message around the same time the tweet was published along with the HTTP request source IP, and traced it (just like in movies) to our secondary news studio in Central London. This is when one of the managers shouted "I know a Colin who works there, he's a testing team manager!".
We gave Colin a ring to understand what was going on, he had no idea about any of this but said he was doing some DR testing earlier of all tools that editors use, and wasn’t really aware this would go out. As you can imagine, it could have been much worse.
The entertaining bit was the 30 minutes of fame this mysterious Colin enjoyed on the internet, where many people were worried about the welfare of "Colin", and it was picked up by various [1] news [2] websites.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/an-important-history-of-t... [2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/an-important-history-of-t...
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#707I'm flabbergasted they haven't just hit the panic button and shut everything down. Unless, perhaps, they can't.
I canna stop it Cap'n, the computer's overridden the manual override!
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#708My bet is on one of those social media managers like Hootsuite/Social Blade/Buffer getting hacked.
Looks like Hootsuite Twitter integration has been having issues for 50 mins now https://status.hootsuite.com/post/623750375373160449/twitter....
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#709Given 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.
It could just be a relatively unsophisticated actor who stumbled upon a serious vulnerability and didn't know enough to market it to, eg, a state actor or whatever.
Someone got mugged with their phone unlocked and the mugger had a friend who was into bitcoin.
Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
#710This is what happens when you put all of your communication eggs into a single basket. Twitter needed to be taken down a couple of pegs. I think accounts of a high enough profile may want to closely examine the ActivityPub ecosystem.
What single basket ? All other communications are working just fine - the world is humming along fine.