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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

This is by far the most eyebrow-raising part of the update. To take over such a large number of verified accounts and then run a download on only eight non-verified ones seems almost impossible to have been anything other than targeted.

The original idea that the bitcoin scam was a diversion starts to look more plausible in this light, but in the absence of any information about the downloaded accounts, there’s really no way to guess what their value may have been and to whom.

Alternately, to throw cold water on the above, maybe the process to kick off a download for verified accounts has extra safeguards and the eight non-verified were simply tests to try to determine why the verified downloads weren’t working.

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The idea that someone would opt out of downloading Elon masks or Jeff bezos’ DMs is insane. Completely and perfectly insane. Not to mention the other people. Even if just in terms of profit, clearly the dms of the richest man in the world have enough value to just click download. It seems like the probability of this guy passing it up due to lack of interest is very small. Slightly more likely is that he was overwhelmed by the massive implications of having this access and simply didn’t think to do it in the rush to do something before his source chickened out or realized what was going on. And most likely to me is that he simply couldn’t do it because of a higher level of security associated with verified accounts, hence why none of the accounts were verified. He wasn’t able to do anything with trumps twitter so I suspect that for certain high profile accounts, there is a much higher level of security that this guys source couldn’t override.

I'm not sure what you're thinking, but it's perfectly reasonable.

People like you're talking about don't communicate anything of value over twitter. Bezos only follows his ex-wife who doesn't follow him back, barely uses twitter and would be unlikely to have any DMs at all. After the saudi hack, I would be surprised if he has much of anything installed on his phone.

The only real reason to hack celebrity accounts in this instance, and which they should have done, would be to deflect attention from the accounts they actually went after.

I wouldn't be so sure with Musk, for example. He even met his partner via DM.

Yeah, Musk spends a lot of time on Twitter, his DMs are def loaded, but I also agree that Bezos' is definitely empty. Still, I'm sure there are some verified accounts they would've downloaded the data from if they could, so it makes me think they couldn't easily.

> Bezos only follows his ex-wife who doesn't follow him back

I honestly didn't believe you. But it's true. That's... kinda weird.

Probably a dead account he no longer access it before divorce, hence the awkward status

Hmm, I don't think so. The account has tweeted as recently as Feb of this year, but his divorce was finalized in July 2019.

I always thought high profile accounts are run by media teams. I doubt the account owners know the credentials themselves or have direct access in most cases.

I’m pretty positive Elon’s account is NOT run by a media team :D

His media team works behind the counter at the pot dispensary.

If you think Musk or Trump have any sense of restraint, much less opsec, do I ever have a bridge to sell you.

Where do you think you will find more info -- the DMs of a PR account or the someone's private alt? Or the DMs of a twitter celebrity or the DMs of a hedge fund manager or member of the board of directors of a bank?

I suspect that hedge fund managers and bank board members are considerably less likely to use DMs as a means of primary communication than Twitter celebrities. Private alt accounts would be very interesting, but you'd need to know who they are....

I'm unfamiliar with Twitter's interface but, isn't it entirely possible that things like DMs are available (when you're able to log in as the account in question) and scrape-able without directly using the "download twitter data" tool?

the it's even weirder because this looks something that required a certain amount of planning

It's also possible that the attackers were unsophisticated and they downloaded data for real-life acquaintances for emotional reasons.

It seems like a sophisticated attacker running a targeted attack such as a government agency would presumably have avoided doing anything noticeable like the public tweets in the hope of being able to avoid detection and target additional people in the future.

I think in cases like this I would rest easier if law enforcement always probed, targetting not the hackers (because I don't think that helps), but the company complicit in victimizing its users. Those companies have an extreme amount of power&knowledge, and should be held to extremely high standards as a result.

> in the absence of any information about the downloaded accounts, there’s really no way to guess what their value may have been and to whom

One possibility I can think of is that a state actor, such as China, was investigating state enemies, such as suspected dissidents. They wanted to get the DMs, but also didn't want the general public to catch on. So they set things up so public discourse would be centered around the Bitcoin scam and celebrity hacks.

If it was a state actor, they'd definitely want access to elon musk's DMs. He hasn't showed a ton of restraint in social media, and he's the CEO of a rocket company that has done some classified launches. And many of these verified users that were hacked have significant roles internationally, whether in trade like with amazon or politically like biden, or with international aid organizations like gates.

Depends on the organization I guess. I can imagine some orgs only caring about internal affairs and not gathering international Intel.

> The original idea that the bitcoin scam was a diversion starts to look more plausible in this light,

This is still absurd to me. What diversion? Twitter knows exactly what was downloaded, and in fact they’re looking at this even closer due to the supposed diversion.

What if the 8 accounts were people who might plausibly know who Satoshi is.

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