Hacker News Reader

Comment by csunbird | Hacker News Reader

I think there are three possible explanations here:

1- (Tinfoil hats please) This is a state owned attack, which is a retaliation from US Government to ruin Twitter's credibility and introduce social media regulations.

2- The hackers are gray hat hackers, who know that reporting this vulnerability will not make them any money and they want to get what they think they deserve, so they make it public and get some good amount of cash.

3- The hackers had realized they had a massive vulnerability in their hands by accident and did not know what to do with it.

I find second and third option plausible, which also reminds me of the npm hack, where a very, very popular library was compromised and installed on a huge amount of developer machines, but only thing they did was to try to get hold of some bitcoin accounts.

I do not condone any type of crime but in both cases, it feels like a huge opportunity was missed by both hackers.

View on HN

Another option is that the BTC was nothing but proof that they compromised those accounts. They had full access to the compromised accounts including any private messages. Now there is public proof that they compromised those accounts and a BTC account they can send funds from to prove it is the same group. This allows them to sell those private DMs along with proof of authenticity.

This possibility makes quite a bit of sense to me. It explains why the attackers went to so much trouble, given that world leader and major CEO DMs could be quite valuable, while also explaining why they bothered with the seemingly trivial crypto scam.

They also don't even need incriminating DMs, they can release fake DMs and use the BTC address to prove "authenticity" to the media. Released at the right time that could be quiet valuable to certain people.

Regarding #1, my thinking was this is China or their allied nations (North Korea, Iran etc). The US has taken extremely forceful steps on China in the last couple of days. This could be their response; discrediting a huge piece of the American crown jewels (big tech companies) and making it a laughing stock.

Just the massive blast radius of the hack reminded me of the NK Sony hack and release of documents. Big up yours to Hollywood from Kim Jong.

I would expect state actors to have gone for a lot more damage than "make Twitter look stupid". Also, all the high-profile state actor hacks I'm aware of were a lot more clandestine - it was months before they were discovered. State actors are highly professional, they're in it for the long haul, and they do serious damage.

The "massive blast radius" of this hack lies more in the damage it could have done, rather than the damage it actually did. This amateur execution makes me think it was some small-time cyber criminal who happened to have the bright idea of bribing a Twitter employee, but didn't have the know-how/creativity/patience to reap its full benefits.

Trump wants nothing more than to “win” against perceived competitors.

Remember when Twitter fact checked those Trump tweets?

Trump is the type of petty person to not let something like this go.

Could also be a #4 that additional data has been exfiltrated that hasn't come to light yet (the DMs of said accounts perhaps?).

Interesting. I assume those accounts are not used by actual people but managed by social media companies, so the DMs should not be anything personal anyways.

nothing but pure speculation, but i came to conclusion #1 more or less independently.

the obvious qui bono is not twitter. and twitters biggest opponent at the moment is?

the pound of salt for that is just that once clandestine motives are introduced theres no bottom to the subversion one would introduce to make attribution difficult.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com