Twitter: Hackers Accessed Private Messages for Elite Accounts | Hacker News Reader

Twitter: Hackers Accessed Private Messages for Elite Accounts

threatpost.com

58 pointsLinuxBender25 comments

Now the FBI is investigating. If it was the same amount of accounts for regular users, who want to bet this would already be swept under the rug?

Well sure, but doesn’t that seem sensible? The consequences are greater when the accounts are those that belong to people with a lot of power.

Looking at the direction that application design is moving towards right now with centralisation of user information into data storage in the cloud, this will only get worse. Just needs a small exploitable vector exposed (whether human or machine) to result in another mass data leak.

My prophesy is that someday we'll wake up, some day in the near future, to news of a massive breach of Gmail data, and it will be the death knell for keeping personal data "in the cloud." What we are doing as an industry now, by encouraging that, is irresponsible.

The antidote is to pretend everything you say to a computer is public record.

That’s not reasonable, of course, but having it in mind changes your behavior.

This isn't feasible, not even remotely. I work from home, do I just stop doing my job? Because I cannot possibly work under such an assumption, at all. I can pretend to, but there is way enough that I must communicate that really should not become public. A lot of other people are in the same boat I guess, especially these days.

Also, not sending anything remotely personal through my phone would make it very, very hard to keep in touch with friends and family. I can't travel to see all of them all the time, and Covid makes meeting the local ones really difficult, too.

I don't think it's constructive to cast huge societal issues as individual failings, with remedies that are absurdly impractical. That only helps to perpetuate the problem.

I think you're really over-estimating how much of what you say would be bad if it were public record, to be honest.

Also the fact that if literally everything everyone said on a computer was public record it'd be so noisy and such a mess nobody would bother looking at what random average people are saying.

The problem with this is that socializing moved to be digital, especially with COVID-19.

Pseudonyms help a little bit, but it's still easy for an attacker to know who you really are.

The mass usage of pseudonyms has the drawback of facilitating the spread of 'bad' information in such a model though. The web-of-trust breaks down with the prevalence of pseudonymous throwaway accounts (which can also be farmed, like on Reddit).

And hopefully a mass exodus, as decentralized alternatives start to become more viable :)

I'll stick with my $5 thumbdrive.

That works until you lose your keychain :/

Perhaps all this was a type of "burn it down", punk activism, and it will be released on twitter for public download. The BTC could have been their funding mechanism. Not for profit, but for the lolz in an election year?

A subset of these messages could be leaked to produce very different optics. Say, only leak the wildest messages sent to certain celebrities or politicians in order to create the perception that their fanbase is purely of that kind, while holding back the more reasonable messages that may make up the majority.

Let's not forget this is almost exactly what happened during the 2016 election. Both the RNC and DNC were hacked.[1] The RNC data simply was never leaked. There are multiple reasons why that might have been the case.

[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-ha...

Isn't this quiet dishonest? IIRC a single RNC dude got hacked and his years-old personal outlook got stolen. Meanwhile the DNC had everything get pwned right at the server.

You remember incorrectly. It was a server used by two of the most prominent GOP Senators not a "years-old personal outlook" from a "single RNC dude". Per the NYT[1]

>Federal investigators, speaking on background, have said that a single email server used by that contractor had been penetrated. But it was going out of service, and contained outdated material that the Russians probably found of little value. People with direct knowledge of the server’s contents said it had been used by Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain.

Maybe nothing of value was on that server. The general public has no way of knowing because the data was never leaked.

And even if the emails themselves didn't provide any incriminating information, I think controversies like pizzagate have shown that even leaks of mundane data can have political repercussions.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/russia-hack-h...

> Comey said there was no sign "that the Trump campaign or the current RNC was successfully hacked."

Sounds like they got nothing interesting.

The most important word in that quote is "current". The RNC was hacked, but it was "old" data. That data was never leaked. It isn't known exactly what time frames constitute "old" and "current" in this context.

Maybe the data wasn't leaked because it didn't have value. That is one of those multiple reasons I alluded to in the previous post. There are also several less optimistic reasons why that data wouldn't have been leaked.

True, but given that Strzok's own notes were recently released and they'd found no coordination with Russia at all, it reads like a conspiracy theory.

DMs from fans are probably not the interesting thing, DMs between personal friends would be far more interesting because they would contain information the person was trying to keep from the public.

Hackers might publish 99% real content with a few minor changes to make it seem like the person who was hacked was doing something they weren't- or they could just make up entirely new meanings for boring conversations as in Pizzagate.

It's unlikely that celebrities and politicians allow DMs from any account. I think that setting is off by default.

I'm not a Twitter user so pardon my ignorance, but do people actually use Twitter DM for personal/sensitive conversations on a regular basis?

I was always under the impression that the majority of people use text, whatsapp/telegram, or facebook for those kinds of discussions.

Most people probably have no idea they should be using a particular platform for any sort of discussion:/

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