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Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

coindesk.com

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Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#971

Post by ragerino »

ragerino wrote: post #968
neurostimulant wrote: post #144

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!

It seems like the devs at Twitter are clueless, how this happened. The hackers could be deep in Twitters systems, eventually even have even someone working at Twitter, or it's a result of a new yet unknown password list or phishing attempt.

Just saw this https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-ac...

Means they had someone inside Twitter.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#973

Post by madeofpalk »

SahAssar wrote: post #961
madeofpalk wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the Twitter web interface is just an client of the Twitter semi-public API, I highly doubt this is it.

But the twitter web interface has access to post (since you can post via it), so it would be possible.

The Twitter web interface doesnt - it's just a javascript app that runs in your browser. To post a tweet, it uses the same public API that all third parties use.

To posit that it was an npm vunrebility in the frontend caused this hack implies that anyone can just curl their way into someone elses account.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#974

Post by e79 »

A lot of people are asking “why a bitcoin scam?”

From what we know right now, targeted accounts had their emails and 2FA reset via an admin tool. These attacks were noisy, so the window of opportunity for the attacker was small. The attack was launched after hours, likely to limit the chance that the compromised Twitter employee would be around. So market manipulation wasn’t really a great option.

This was basically a “smash and grab” style attack, which makes sense given the noisy nature of the access. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter’s admin tool purposely doesn’t allow employees to silently access accounts.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#976

Post by swiley »

doomjunky wrote: post #891
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.

I remember last year around christmas/new year 2018/2019 a similar hack/leak/doxxing took place, targeting 994 (!!) mostly german politicians, celebrities and influencers. Massive amounts of private information (names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mails, DMs, contacts, online profiles, chat logs, private documents and even intimate details) where leaked. The data was published on a wide spread of public pastebins and…

Anything cellphone related is absolute crap; Security and otherwise.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#977

Post by sidcool »

neurostimulant wrote: post #144

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!

Is the root cause and attack vector known?

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#978

Post by vbsteven »

dluan wrote: post #575

for 15 minutes society was perfect, i felt invigorated and had the ability to dream new dreams, and we were all loving friends. and then the blue checks came back.

Sounds like the outro for Bonjour Tristesse - The end of the world.

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#979

Post by leto_ii »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #260

Given 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.

Just wild speculation, but could it also be a stock-market play? It seems the stock went down by quite a bit in after-hours trading [0]. Shorting the stock I guess would have earned you quite a bit more than the few BTC made directly.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/15/twitter-stock-slides-after...

Re: Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack

#980

Post by madmulita »

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…

They might be too busy renaming all their 'master' branches.
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