Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/15/major-twitter-hack-pushes-bitc.html
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Not trump’s account? Hmmmmm
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This sounds like a boring hack. Why can’t it be fun and exciting like Trump’s account tweeting out the piss tape instead?
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God I live for some of the stuff the Wendy’s account tweets out
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Why the hell does Twitter have a customer support function that lets them post to users’ accounts? The fact that this attack was carried out with knowledge of this ‘feature’ makes me suspect an inside job or, at the least, an insider leak of compromising information about Twitter’s security design (or lack thereof).
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Would you trust him?
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It’s a massive attack – probably the biggest breach in Twitter’s history. And so far has not done so much – a bit over $100k – and I expect the hackers knew it wouldn’t get much. You can get more than that by locking up the database of a medium-sized hospital with randomware.
It’s hit Obama, Biden, Bloomberg, Bezos, Gates, Buffett – top Dems and people who have pissed Trump off. Not a single one of Trump’s surrogates or high members of the Republican party.
I’m assuming it’s Russia flexing its muscles, and/or a test-run.
This is also a huge, huge failure for Twitter. The fact that’s it’s been going on for nearly an hour. They’ve managed to delete all the tweets as they come up, but they’re still re-hacking the same accounts again and again.
Makes me wonder if the point of this isn’t to sow distrust in reality/Twitter/media.
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Kanye got hit too
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If you fell for this, I feel bad for you. Also, there’s a bank in Nigeria I need to extract funds from, but I need you to send me $1000 and I’ll repay it double. And there’s a bridge in Manhattan I own which I’ll sell to you for the same $1000.
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I guess that does kinda count as a Trump surrogate, true.
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As a side note, Elon Musk’s account wasn’t hacked. He saw the other tweets and thought it was a nifty idea.
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I doubt that, as they have now revealed their attack route.
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Nothing you could tweet would likely present as rich an opportunity as foreknowledge of this event would present, wrt the behaviour of the stock, perhaps? Indeed, that the actions are so frivolous might be interpreted by some that this was not a sophisticated hack, therefore Twitter might seem especially vulnerable
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I frequently see weird bitcoin scams going on in response to Trump tweets, using accounts with names made to look like Elon Musk and frequent Trump responders (often critics). Lots of “gosh, this is real and I got so much money, thanks!” responses from other fake accounts. When I saw this, I just assumed it was more of that. I can’t imagine this was that much more profitable than those usual scams.
A real failure of imagination. If you had access to these accounts, you could engage in all sorts of high-value scams, especially if you had some money to throw into things, and a command of the English language. I’m guessing these people had neither, which is why the message is a cut-and-paste. The whole thing seems like someone lucked into the Twitter account control and rushed to put together a scheme on the fly before they got booted out.
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Since Elon Musk fanboys are nearly as fanatical as Steve Jobs fanboys were, and probably know how to Bitcoin the most out of followers of the accounts listed, I would expect that’s the biggest group who got suckered.
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Apart from this, what about all the scam accounts that just post their Bitcoin scams right after a famous person tweets? Every time I see any tweet by Musk there’s a followup post from someone saying “Elon Musk is giving away bitcoin” or some crap, with obvious fake replies about “wow, didn’t think it would work but it did! just received my bitcoin!”
Apparently Twitter didn’t care about that, and it’s probably the same scammers who pulled off this hack.
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someone hacked the new API?
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