Report on Investigation of Twitter’s July 15, 2020 Cybersecurity Incident

https://www.dfs.ny.gov/Twitter_Report

by lelf • 6 years ago

102 54 6 years ago

dfs.ny.gov

hmate9• 6 years ago

Still pretty hilarious that they only managed to get some $100k worth of Bitcoin.

Imagine if instead they tweeted from Musk saying something along the lines of Tesla batteries being faulty and they all need to be recalled. Buy some Tesla puts beforehand and that right there is instant millions.

Heck, even selling the rights to this hack would have gotten them millions.

xuki• 6 years ago

$100k is a huge amount for a 17 years old kid.

bisRepetita• 6 years ago

Yes, but don't you think that your proposed scheme it is very easily traceable and reversible?

paulgb• 6 years ago

I think you're right, but it's funny (scary?) to think about how “newbie trader makes big options trade on TSLA” is probably not exceedingly rare in the age of Robinhood and WallStreetBets.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

well, it was easily traceable what they did anyway. Some schemes can be more easily hidden than others.

If you were smart enough to think hey, wait instead of stealing bitcoin I could just use this to cause some stocks to have problems then I can short them.

At the point you are smart enough to switch from the dominant way of making money in your enterprise you can probably think up multiple ways to make money that would be even sneakier, and think of ways to hide it, keep the money even if you get caught.

Kiro• 6 years ago

Sell what? They called Twitter employees pretending to be from the IT department.

Armed with these personal details, the Hackers successfully convinced several Twitter employees that they were from Twitter’s IT department and stole their credentials.

polote• 6 years ago

Coinbase blocked approximately 5,670 transfers, valued at approximately $1,294,000.

cageface2• 6 years ago

Wasn’t the whole point of crypto that some centralized authority couldn’t do things like this?

rocqua• 6 years ago

Bitcoin is a bit traceable. Massively out of the money puts are incredibly traceable, and quite well monitored.

norswap• 6 years ago

Some insight as to why it's had to make money from the hack: https://fortenf.org/e/security/2020/07/15/twitter-hack.html

nobody9999• 6 years ago

Heck, even selling the rights to this hack would have gotten them millions.

IIUC, the crackers did sell access to the hacked accounts[0]:

"Sheppard’s alleged alias Chaewon was mentioned twice in stories here since the July 15 incident. On July 16, KrebsOnSecurity wrote that just before the Twitter hack took place, a member of the social media account hacking forum OGUsers named Chaewon advertised they could change email address tied to any Twitter account for $250, and provide direct access to accounts for between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece."

But that didn't net anyone millions, but apparently that wasn't the point of the hack[1]:

"People within the SIM swapping community are obsessed with hijacking so-called “OG” social media accounts. Short for “original gangster,” OG accounts typically are those with short profile names (such as @B or @joe). Possession of these OG accounts confers a measure of status and perceived influence and wealth in SIM swapping circles, as such accounts can often fetch thousands of dollars when resold in the underground."

[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/three-charged-in-july-15...

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/whos-behind-wednesdays-e...

_56593• 6 years ago

I literally felt the hand of the Doomsday Clock move closer to midnight, and all these hackers were interested in was making a bunch of traceable transactions to a few accounts linked to Gmail.

For shame, we need to be teaching our youth better dystopian hacker ethics.

Kaveren3• 6 years ago

you spend too much time online if you think you can start any war over twitter

_56593• 6 years ago

Respectfully, I don't think I'm spending too much time online to be cognizant of the fact that we have an administration that is very much capable of doing so.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/10/trump-almost...

dang• 6 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24835277.

himinlomax2• 6 years ago

In monetary value, the Hackers stole over $118,000 worth of bitcoin

Did they, really? I mean anyone stupid enough to fall for that ploy was going to lose it some other way shortly anyway.

SirHound• 6 years ago

Via theft?

throw_m239339• 6 years ago

Fraud is illegal, wire fraud is a federal crime. You didn't really demonstrate a shred of intelligence yourself by praising scammers defrauding people, scammers that eventually got caught because of their complete stupidity.

himinlomax2• 6 years ago

That was a joke. An obvious one, too.

moritonal• 6 years ago

Don't be cruel to the desperate.

obilgic• 6 years ago

The language of this release feels rather off...

AzzieElbab• 6 years ago

10 to 1, it was somebody at Twitter outsourcing their work to wrong person

junon2• 6 years ago

Twitter plays a central role in how we communicate and how news is spread.

The fact a government agency has said this in an official report is saddening.

tudelo• 6 years ago

Can you expand on why it's sad? As someone who doesn't have a twitter account or participate much in social networking sites, it still seems like a true statement at face value for a large part of the population.

junon2• 6 years ago

It is indeed true. I suppose it's more the juxtaposition of Twitter, which many people (including myself) have come to despise, with the government, which should be impartial about private endeavors (arguably), in the same report about Twitter's security deficiencies related to the election.

It's just a strange pairing, and to me a bit sad that Twitter of all things has become America's backbone of formal communication.

It feels like it could be in Idiocracy. That's all.

yavanim• 6 years ago

Step 1: Call up Twitter employees and say you're Twitter's IT department and ask the employee to visit a page to troubleshoot a connection problem they're having, and that page asks for a username, password, and MFA code

Step 2: With that password, log in to the internal website Twitter employees use to moderate accounts, change jack's account password to "password", log in to twitter.com with username "jack" and password "password" (and repeat for every user you want to login as)

Step 3: Make a tweet saying "send Bitcoin to [address] and I'll send double back"

Report on Investigation of Twitter’s July 15, 2020 Cybersecurity Incident

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