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from the sounds-like-eating-at-Taco-Bell dept.
Hackers Tell the Story of the Twitter Attack From the Inside:
A Twitter hacking scheme that targeted political, corporate and cultural elites this week began with a teasing message between two hackers late Tuesday on the online messaging platform Discord.
"yoo bro," wrote a user named "Kirk," according to a screenshot of the conversation shared with The New York Times. "i work at twitter / don't show this to anyone / seriously."
He then demonstrated that he could take control of valuable Twitter accounts — the sort of thing that would require insider access to the company's computer network.
[...] Despite global attention on the intrusion, which has shaken confidence in Twitter and the security provided by other technology companies, the basic details of who were responsible, and how they did it, have been a mystery. Officials are still in the early stages of their investigation.
But four people who participated in the scheme spoke with The Times and shared numerous logs and screen shots of the conversations they had on Tuesday and Wednesday, demonstrating their involvement both before and after the hack became public.
The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers. Instead, it was done by a group of young people — one of whom says he lives at home with his mother — who got to know one another because of their obsession with owning early or unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like @y or @6.
The Times verified that the four people were connected to the hack by matching their social media and cryptocurrency accounts to accounts that were involved with the events on Wednesday. They also presented corroborating evidence of their involvement, like the logs from their conversations on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers and hackers, and Twitter.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday July 22 2020, @01:07PM (13 children)
"The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers"
This is the critical line.
There is no way to distinguish "bunch of kids on a forum" from "government-funded hacking department with any kind of skill and reason to hide themselves".
Every time you hear "Russia hacked..." "China attacked..." or whatever, in online terms, then it's generally utter unfounded speculation, because it came from a Russian or Chinese IP. Which means about as much as me owning a Made In China shoe, and then trying to claim I'm an agent of the Chinese government.
One day some idiot is gonna start a way because of a Wargames-like bunch of kids messing about or writing a virus, and then the idiot using it as a convenient excuse to invade the South China Sea or whatever.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday July 22 2020, @01:20PM (8 children)
Another possibility is that the evidence isn't being shared with you, because it would reveal some government's capabilities and level of infiltration.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday July 22 2020, @01:45PM (1 child)
Do you believe yourself of what you say?
This is a common excuse often used by governments, while fabulating a political propaganda story. Cooking of pure water, we say.
In real intelligence agencies, if the evidence is not presentable for any reason, the only option is silence.
In a paradigm of Law, or in a paradigm of Science, or in a paradigm of Diplomacy, or in a paradigm of Military, not providing good evidence disqualifies the statement completely.
It's only in paradigms of Politics and Religion where piles of nonsense could be stacked incoherently into complex structures of pseudo truths and accepted as tolerable opinions and facts.
This is exactly the main cause of the western political decadency and inverted reality: a sudden belief in own created and previously spread lies.
It's not the first time in history.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 22 2020, @04:38PM
I believe Edward Snowden. [salon.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday July 22 2020, @01:48PM
On the other hand, unless they are lying, they quite openly spell out here that there should be a mountain of evidence. Seems like a lot of what they did was in the UI level only and unless there is a big button there saying something like like delete all logs there should be a fair amount of evidence to look at and trace. If it can be traced to an actual person and not just some IP in outer Mongolia or similar is another matter.
Interesting about the part in the end how he was sad that he (or she) only made 20 bitcoins on the whole scam, cause $180k is just nothing but change ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @02:42PM
you mean like the pictures of the weapons of mass-destruction from Irak, right?
so secret was the intelligence that even the physical objects in the photograph were never revealed.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:18PM (3 children)
Unfortunately the internet is not nearly as magical as cyberpunk would have led us to hope. Even an individual can make themselves, for all intents and purposes, untraceable on the internet. And governments tend to have greater resources at their disposal. So some sort of ultra secret mega digital stealth tracking black ice system just isn't a thing. So the only reasonable degree of intelligence would be a mole. And that's possible, but I think our scenario also precludes that. Why? Because we, the people, know about the allegations.
Imagine e.g. China is guilty as charged. That would mean, due to the above, that they also now know they have a mole and probably what would have been in a relatively small team. It's not going to be too hard to ferret it out. So we would blow a mole in a significant level of Chinese intelligence over some mostly inane charges? That makes no sense whatsoever. If you're ever going to let on that you have a mole you're only going to do so for an *extremely* good reason.
In general I find that when you start to mix "intelligence" with the media, that's increasingly not going to be anything but straight up propaganda. Similar to Iraq. For years we were fade complete lies from the intelligence agencies to justify what culminated in a war from which we still have not extricated ourselves which has cost of thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. And what should be increasingly clear is that the political establishment is currently grooming the US citizenry for what will *hopefully* "just" be a cold war with Russia and/or China. And these sort of allegations being made public helps to achieve that. Because we potentially are on the precipice of destroying what has been a nearly unprecedented peace (between major powers) for the past 30 years. People need to be seeing (and terrified) of Reds everywhere to even consider something so monumentally stupid. And we're getting there.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:57PM (1 child)
It cuts the other way, too, though--it is also fairly easy to screw up anonymizing/masking your trail/whatever if you don't entirely know what you're doing (or even just make a mistake). So if The Man's investigators run across somebody who has perfectly covered their tracks, which is more likely: that they're self-taught and pulled it off flawlessly, or they're trained/backed by some other powerful organization/government?
Maybe based on the volume of script kiddie attacks observed to be coming from Russia and China, when they can't identify where an attack is coming from, they just assume it's from Russia/China.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @07:42AM
Again, the internet is not magical or even especially interesting. A sends packets to B. B can determine who A is. Covering up your tracks doesn't mean you somehow use magic to make this untrue, but instead you simply change your source location. And this is not hard to do. Compromised machines, proxies, public access points, etc make it easy to weave from one side of the globe to other with no constraints how 'deep' you can proxy. To understand the dilemma imagine the issue of tracking even a single layer where a person connects (ensuring no visibility to cameras/etc) to a public insecure hotspot where hundreds of others connect. All you have to go on at this point is signal strength, a completely meaningless MAC address (easily spoofed), and duration of connection. Who dunnit!? Now repeat these scenario across dozens of proxies worldwide and try to figure out again whodunnit.
It's simply not possible. The one argument they might have had in the past is that certain locations were using certain forms of attacks, but that is at best a dubious form of attribution which is easily faked and now a days that various agencies toolkits (including the NSA's) have leaked, it's plainly absurd. When you see the things where we do "track" people it's invariably people being dumb. For instance the 'denanoymizing attack' we used against Bitcoin was somebody setting up their Bitcoin wallet using Coinbase and then using that wallet thinking they were anonymous - I shit you not. People, in general, are stupid. Yet the average criminal makes the average person look like a genius.
Our intelligence forces will attribute attacks to whoever they want to attribute attacks to for political purposes. We, as in the establishment in DC, clearly want an escalation of conflict with Russia and China, and so we're going to invent the evidence for that whether or not it exists. I mean for fucks sake think about this stuff logically. What does, for instance, Russia or China stand to gain from escalating tensions with the US? Absofuckinglutely nothing. What do we stand to gain from escalating tensions? Absolutely everything:
1) China's economy is now the largest and the world and skyrocketing while our's is looking like a 90 year old dick - once proud and firm, now shriveled, limp, and dying.
2) Due to our freedoms China's economic growth is guaranteed. They're cheap and reliable. Only way this changes is if *something* makes it more profitable for companies to stop using Chinese labor/production.
3) The military industrial complex is basically a giant jobs program. Get it kick started with war and you stand to potentially kickstart the US economy.
4) We rely on the petrodollar as an indirect backing of our currency. China + Russia are fucking this up by both producing and consuming massive amounts of fuel not traded on the greenback. They've also been flirting with our BFF Saudi Arabia.
Etc.
Basically places such as China and Russia stand to dramatically benefit from the status quo. By contrast we stand to lose dramatically in the status quo and have a long history of simply lying when necessary to justify war. All of this stuff is such complete and utter bullshit and people eat it up like candy. Drives me nuts. Somebody else demonstrated another hilarious contradiction in our allegations here [soylentnews.org].
- Russia has secret vaccine but is withholding it from its own citizens
- Russia is stealing our vaccines!
That alone is amusing but even the first point is absurd in itself as was pointed out. Vaccines are nasty and dangerous stuff when going through testing. The elite don't inject Version 0.1 into themselves. They throw that shit out on the masses and see what happens. And then after several iterations they take, if necessary, version 10 of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @08:07PM
hey! look over there: a flying crocodile with a blue mobile phone for dinner.
"intelligence" is being able to make this into "for .. while" loop that never ends...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @02:01PM (2 children)
Do you honestly think that state governments are unable to recruit a few jump hosts for their work?
But that's how you get people in jail, even without a sham trial. This includes America.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/25/guantanamo-files-casio-wristwatch-alqaida [theguardian.com]
Funny thing, when I was a kid in 1980s, I had a very similar CASIO watch too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2020, @03:01PM
You missed the point of his comment.
He was indeed saying that attribution is, realistically, not possible. And so when you care of a case being because of China, or Russia, or whatever else - it is generally, at best, going to be wildly speculative. And given that our government seems to be trying to prime Americans for what will hopefully only be a cold war with those nations, this sort of speculation begins to take on the form of outright propaganda.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 22 2020, @04:41PM
I'm sure the NSA is completely unaware that VPNs exist...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 22 2020, @04:35PM
Edward Snowden disagrees with you. [salon.com]