1. It's incredible that the security of Twitter allows for a solitary 17-year old to gain full access to (any) account.
2. This also explains why the profit of the hack was 'only' ~$100k. Many speculated about how incredibly valuable such a hack could be and how much more a group could have profited from this hack. Using it for two hours of bitcoin scamming seemed very amateurish. I suppose this explains it.
Someone else spoke to him being a teenager as not especially relevant, and I agree; it dismisses teenagers somewhat.
You're also falling for a selection bias. Twitter is a big target and likely stops attacks like this daily. This is just the one that got through, and probably more because of luck than skill.
"We believe that for up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox, including 1 elected official in the Netherlands."
You might be on to something.
Of course Bitcoin is highly traceable as well, so maybe the lesson is hacking into high-profile Twitter accounts just isn't as profitable as you'd hope?
* A set of freshly opened accounts.
* That only shorted a single stock.
* Right before a major hack.
* That cashed out all at once.
* That never traded again.
And then they'd start calling the owners of those accounts, and asking questions. Most of those accounts would be legitimate traders, but that's fine - there's not that many accounts that satisfy four of those five criteria. A few sql queries can narrow it down to the point that basic detective work can solve the rest.
The problem with playing stupid games on the stock market is that there's a very clear paper trail that will link you, as a human being, to the money that you're hoping to make. At least with bitcoin, you can theoretically isolate yourself from the source of the funds, through tumblers, transferring money in and out of shady exchanges, etc.
This is also exactly how the SEC catches insider-traders. By analyzing the flow of trades, and following up on suspicious ones. If the first and only trade you've ever done in your life is a $200,000 short[1] on your employer twenty minutes before a disastrous earnings, you might soon be talking to a very nicely dressed man who would love to get another conviction under his belt.
[1] If you think you're playing 34-d chess, and have done a bunch of other options trades surrounding it, to disguise it, you're just as likely to piss away all of your money before you even get a chance to insider-trade. That's the beauty of options - they will part a fool from their money before they can spit.
Insider trading is one of the few things it is really good at prosecuting - mostly because it's dead-easy to identify, easy to prove, often performed by idiots, and has a lot of incredibly-well established law surrounding it that makes turning piles of evidence into jail time easy.
None of these reasons hold for other financial crimes, which is why there are so few bankers and executives going to jail for everything that's not insider trading.
Maybe the SEC is just good at catching people who don’t think through the paper trail.
For example: buy up a load of super cheap shitcoins. Can be done for under $100. Then tweet from an exchange like Binance that they will shortly be listing said shitcoin. Watch the price go up, sell.
Or, with a bit more money, short one of the cryptocurrencies, tweet from a big exchange that they were hacked, profit on the panic selling.
The nice thing is, they could do one or even multiple of these and still do the scam.
He could have done the scam on eg Elon Musks amount to get some bitcoin and then pulled this scam on an exchange using the money from the first scam
Sounds like a great way to have a crooked exchange make you insolvent very quickly. Be very careful using any kind of leverage.
Still, in the described scenario, where you use a scam and market manipulation, 100x seems like a great tool.
But if you were pulling the twitter scam, as I described, you would be risking a few $K on this trade in the hopes for making a million or two, while still being able to do the scam they did. Sure, there are risks (such as being able to withdraw at all after using the twitter hack to manipulate the market), but chances are there are plenty of others who will have shorted too so you’d be part of the noise and wait a week before withdrawing. Its not a perfect plan, but its straightforward with the potential to multiply the scammed money.
I say this as a former teenager