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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: 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.