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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

#781

Post by caetris1 »

My original comment was deleted, so I'll try this again.

I've read the comments here and quite surprisingly there are a lot of folks saying that the value of this hack isn't worth more than roughly one year's salary at Twitter (as an intern). I appreciate the pragmatism, but unlikely.

Anyone with this kind of exploit could have sold it, moved to Russia, and received immunity from extradition. Secondly, people should be scrutinizing any moron willing to give away thousands of dollars to billionaires for a promise of a 2x return. Especially in these times.

So, reason can only allow us to arrive at a most likely cause. That this was indeed an inside job. It was not about money. It was not a security flaw. But rather, it was simply a group of employees that were unhappy with Twitter allowing the federal government to investigate bad actors on the platform behind closed doors.

And here is why: https://www.scribd.com/document/467148777/DHS-Social-Media-L...

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#782

Post by malikNF »

This "send me btc to send you more btc"scam has been happening for the past few months and Charles Hoskinson (https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles), founder of the Cardano blockchain was warning about this issue for a while, he mentioned his team was trying to get in touch with twitter and youtube to stop this and these companies have let this slide for a while.

[edit]

some are wondering if this is some type of money laundering scheme https://twitter.com/nktpnd/status/1283521742602940420

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#783

Post by trophycase »

malikNF wrote: post #782

This "send me btc to send you more btc"scam has been happening for the past few months and Charles Hoskinson ( https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles ), founder of the Cardano blockchain was warning about this issue for a while, he mentioned his team was trying to get in touch with twitter and youtube to stop this and these companies have let this slide for a while. [edit] some are wondering if this is some type of money l…

Past few years, actually.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#784

Post by mikewhy »

vehementi wrote: post #289
mikewhy wrote: post #22

Headline seems pretty editorialized.

Sounds exactly correct to me.

When I posted my comment the title simply read "twitter compromised". I'm not sure if the exact nature of the attack is known, but it definitely wasn't at the time.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#785

Post by rudolph9 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #693
rudolph9 wrote: post #669

I was thinking the other day about a digital signature for limited character tweets. Provided I’m not a cryptography expert and you should explore my ideas with caution, why not even just sign every tweet with an ed25519 signature? It’s on 64 bytes tacked onto the message and easy to verify...

Or put the tweets onto a blockchain...

I mean you could but seems unnecessary.

Putting tweets on a blockchain would make it very difficult to delete them or edit them but offer no more certainty than a regular tweet that includes a signature verifiable with a known public key of mine.

I just don’t don’t want someone impersonating me on any one of the many random website I have a profile where anyone with access to the db can write whatever they want under my name.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#786

Post by ketzo »

zelly wrote: post #772
fishtoaster wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would a state actor do with this? Read celebrities' DMs?

Imagine if every celebrity you knew in New York suddenly started tweeting about some kind of massive rioting.

Imagine if every verified account related to finance started tweeting “cash out your accounts NOW.”

You could easily, easily cause some pretty massive panic.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#787

Post by Hongwei »

This may be the last straw that tips politicians over into considering Twitter & co utilities - stuff that the gov has a say in running because failure is unacceptable to the public.

Not that I think the gov could do a better job, but that doesn't stop them elsewhere.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#788

Post by khazhoux »

jsnell wrote: 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…

I can't count the number of times people have asked here "How can Twitter possibly employ 4,000+ employees?". Well, I suppose we've learned 4K isn't even enough for good anti-abuse systems.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#790

Post by metrokoi »

benlumen wrote: post #510
byteshock wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You say they'd target POTUS but of the very high profile accounts it's so far billionaires, corporations and democrat politicians. Does make you wonder.

The POTUS account likely has more additional security than normal accounts.
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