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!
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 saw multiple tweets from other accounts that showed a screenshot of the scam tweet originating from the twitter support account. I’m not sure if it’s real or not, since they keep deleting the tweets. If it is real that would definitely open doors to more theories.
Edit 3: Seems like the twitter support account was a joke. Impossible to tell with everything going on!
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.
Not sure why you are being downvoted given that this is probably correct? Sounds like the attack was through an admin portal. Given that Trump was one of the few high profile accounts not targeted, it seems like the attackers were not able to access his account through that portal. And his Twitter has been attacked by employees before so Twitter probably locked it down so employees can't modify it.
Maybe not everybody with internal tools can mess with it. Because somebody with internal tools already messed with it before and it didn't look very well for twitter. So if there's anybody with brains there they probably made some measures so it won't happen again.
I'm constantly amazed that people who are critical of billionaires and corporations, never wonder why billionaires and corporations are usually democrat supporters.
> I'm constantly amazed that people who are critical of billionaires and corporations, never wonder why billionaires and corporations are usually democrat supporters.
Most billionaires and large corporations have connections in, and make donations to, both major parties. The people who are critical of billionaires and corporations tend to also be the people that point out that the dominant faction of the Democratic Party (less sophisticated members of the critical group will shorten this to just the Democratic Party, without making the factional distinction) has for decades been, in economic policy terms, a center-right pro-corporate neoliberal group, not a progressive one.
I'm pretty sure most billionaires support the GOP. I don't have a citation. But neither did you. Let's not turn HN into a hodgepodge of wild unbacked claims. That's what reddit is for.
1. Most want cheap foreign labour via H1b Visas which is currently more of a democrat thing (it's republican thing too but Trump is avoiding that right now). They claim they like diversity but it's actually just importing H1B visas who basically get exploited by the companies because if they don't over perform, then they don't get promoted and therefore get fired leading them to get deported back. This is also why these companies have the "get promoted every 1-2 years or you are fired".
2. Most don't publicly support GOP because they don't want to get cancelled.
PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures.
I'm not sure the FB counts as democratic. At best he's big shades of gray with contradicting indications.
Out of the top four richest tech billionaires, according to forbes, only one of them is not most likely conservative and that one tries to stay out of politics, i.e. bill gates.
The next two have clear conservative leanings or contradicting indications, i.e. Bezos and Zuck.
Number four is Larry Ellison, who recently hosted a trump fundraiser. Well here is what wikipedia has on him:
Politics
Ellison was critical of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, saying that "Snowden had yet to identify a single person who had been 'wrongly injured' by the NSA's data collection".[85] He has donated to both Democratic and Republican politicians,[86] and in late 2014 hosted Republican Senator Rand Paul at a fundraiser at his home.[87][88]
Ellison was one of the top donors to Conservative Solutions PAC, a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential bid. As of February 2016, Ellison had given $4 million overall to the PAC.[89] In 2020, Ellison hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump at his Rancho Mirage estate.[90][91]
Simple, billionaires are usually Democratic because they tend to come from liberal backgrounds in liberal areas: Zuckerberg, Gates, or anyone who's come up through universities recently is younger and thus more Democratic leaning. It's really a case of demographics.
I edited my comment, but basically I saw tweets that showed a screenshot of the scam tweet from the twitter support account. Not sure if it’s real since they delete the scam tweets.
The Twitter backend is probably heavily sprinkled with statements like `account_handle match { case "therealdonaldtrump" => throw new TrumpNotAllowedException("can't do"); }`
Especially after the last insider account tampering event.
I do think it's odd that so many prominent accounts were hit but not Trump's. I remember there was an incident a couple years ago that a trust and safety employee at Twitter suspended Trump's account on their last day. It's very likely that after that incident, special guards were set in place to prevent admin tools from messing with Trump's account. This would align with speculation that this hack targeted an internal employee admin tool.
"3 people have been sentenced to death for participating in demonstrations. They could be subject to execution at any moment. This sends a deplorable message to the world and should not occur. #dont_execute"
[edit: not sure why this is getting so much silent attention. It is a literal translation of the tweet referenced in OP.]
Write through caches would need to send the tweets through the normal channels for them to 'fan out' instead of writing directly to MySQL. But essentially what you're saying about possible backend compromise.
It "feels" like an insider attack (simultaneous compromise of lots of high value accounts) but I agree, it will make for a fascinating post mortem if one is produced.
And now this : A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts.
Hmm, how much money this scam would potentially generates? I think the salary of an engineer working on twitter would be higher given how fast this scam would be shut down. Would a twitter employee risk their career to this scam?
I would be surprised if it were an engineer, but not everyone who is employed would be an engineer. When I was at Google two fairly high profile incidents were enacted by contractors (one in the IT "TechStop" group and one a data center tech)
It may be that the github outage is related. Too many companies rely on 3rd party hosted services for their deployment workflow. Even ones you really would not expect.
> 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!
Imagine that. At that point it would be more secure to self-host the code off of GitHub to push that critical fix Twitter sorely needs right now.
> ... and twitter's employees can't deploy a fix for the exploit fast enough because github was down!
I sincerely doubt Twitter depends on github.com. Github's enterprise version runs on your own infra, self-managed, and if Twitter uses GH at all, that'd be the version they use.
and yet lots of technical type Twitter personalities tweeting like each individual user got popped. "OMG THEY GOT MR BEAST!" No, they got twitter. I mean its possible, we do not know, but this "They GOT so and so" thing is annoying at this point.
Don't know, but current corporate dogma is to not host anything, including using third party auth provider which is like giving away their customer list.
Many larger corporations have strict rules on keeping things like their source code in-house, so that means no external services for code reviews or CI, etc.
Do you mean that they prefer using managed services? Or do you mean that the services managed by their internal IT utlize AWS/etc for servers as opposed to on premises.
They prefer to use managed services through third parties. Even to their detriment as those third parties basically own their customer lists. If for instance the auth provider goes out of businesses the business would end. Same with code, most new companies are using something like gitlab or github. But it's not as dangerous as many people will have a copy of the source code cloned.
I wonder if this is hack in the sense that the account passwords were compromised or that the system itself was compromised in a way that would allow the attacker to tweet from any account.
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.
I can't see that bill gates, Elon musk and every cryptocurrency channel using the same manager. This looks like something closer to a Twitter hack than an intermediary, especially with the the reposting after deletion.
No way, it's way too widepread and would be shut down by now.
Elon Musk, Barack Obama and Wiz Khalifa just tweeted the scam again this very minute, more than an hour since it started. This is backend access, Twitter can't figure out how to shut it down.
They could have shut these bitcoin giveaway scams down with a single regex a year ago when they first showed up. They let them go and this is the price they will pay. Let's see if someone is going to sue Twitter because 'verified' to be Bill Gates is meaningless now.
But when you post a tweet via api, the tweet will include the app's name at the bottom? The screenshot in the article has "Twitter Web App" at the bottom.
Its not hard to believe that a group with the ability to hijack the twitter accounts of some of the world's most influential people could also hijack the "posted by" metadata.
> 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 Twitter really using GitHub internally (even self-hosted)?
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!