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Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

In an interview with the hacker by Vice Motherboard, they claimed they had an employee on the inside doing all the work, and they just paid the employee to do it:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-ac...

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Like the other commenter, I am also skeptical of this. This has to be a big amount and in some untraceable account otherwise why would a well paid Twitter employee put his career in jeopardy over something like this. You can look at audit trail and pretty much nail the person who did this, and then after that good luck with the criminal charges and making yourself unemployable.

You're assuming that all Twitter employees are paid well.

I just don't buy it. This guy or girl managed to get a job at Twitter but was willing to sell access to underground hackers for a bit of extra cash and expected no blowback? When the hackers were instructing the employee to post these tweets on behalf of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, did the employee not wonder if this could go wrong for him?

I think it's possible. Not everyone think rationally all the time. Perhaps this employee was blackmailed, perhaps s•he was soon fired from Twitter and wanted to get more money without thinking about the consequences.

Most people in jail didn't think or care about what could go wrong.

> This guy or girl managed to get a job at Twitter...

The employee was likely a customer service rep. Incidents like this have happened before at Twitter, in 2017 a customer service rep at their San Francisco office deleted Trump's account:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-01/trump-twitter-employe...

> When the hackers were instructing the employee to post these tweets...

The employee didn't post the tweets, their involvement was changing the email addresses on the accounts they were told to (which bypasses 2FA). The Krebs article shows screenshots of the Twitter customer support dashboard for an account:

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

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