Hacker News Reader

Comment by ibejoeb | Hacker News Reader

Nothing in the complaint (well, for the two others, since his is sealed) says that a state-level actor wasn't involved. Could be the tip of the iceberg. I find it hard to believe that this was prank hacking for about $150,000. You could sell Obama's handle for more, surely.

View on HN

Do you know anybody willing to pay over $150,000 for temporary access to Obama’s twitter account? I find this type of comment kind of naive and poorly thought out.

Just because you’re a hacker doesn’t mean you know how to sell secrets to Russia, and trying to establish lines of communication like that are probably going to raise red flags with law enforcement.

To be fair, the strategy of scamming for bitcoin was crazily simplistic and destined to fail, due to how easy it is to track bitcoin. I am not at all surprised that some of the people allegedly involved have already been caught.

Cue the entire movie "Burn after reading."

Kid had the whole attention of the world for a few minutes, could've walked away a billionaire, start WW3, casino royale stock trading - everything, anything - CREATIVELY there's so much that could've been done and it all fell down to a bitcoin scam that netted less that 150K (wallet shows about 128k.)

That's a yearly salary of a help desk engineer on the west coast.

--I'm not sure which video to link of "Burn after reading" but the entire movie is how this was handled.

you cannot start world war 3 or become a billionaire through some tweets, this is not a movie.

I feel like it would have been relatively trivial to make decent 7-9 figures depending on your initial leverage just by manipulating some key accounts. Ie: short Tesla, musks account says solar roof delays, firmware error has started bricking cars, self driving is 10 years away, delivery numbers going to fall well short

Trump (surprised they didn’t hit that) - no new stimulus for unemployed, CORPORATE WELFARE MUST STOP, I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR MASSIVE DEFICITS, then pick a couple small cap companies that are going to receive massive boosts like the Kodak thing.

Tim Cook: Apple sales flagging, iPhone production issues due to supply chain issues

Take a bit of timing to get it right and be able to walk away from the markets relatively untraced (market trade interrogation is a useful way to trace inside information so hard to do in a way that leaves no trace but if you know you can perform your hack at leisure you can set up the initial trades well forward, wait for the market and some other external condition to walk into your ambush and then pounce

Even setting up your trades in advance, there's no way you're going to make a billion dollars doing that kind of thing without being noticed. Millions, maybe (although maybe not), but certainly not hundreds of millions. Unless you already have hundreds of millions to work with, but then you're probably not a 17-year-old hacker.

Best case he'd probably have a few tens of thousands in capital, and he gets one shot at it. In order to get the kind of leverage needed, he'd need to use short term options and/or move penny stocks. Either one of those would paint a giant target on him.

Personally, I find "it was a prank" extremely easy to believe. It's the simplest answer to the question "Wait, if someone compromised Twitter so badly they could tweet anything from any account, why didn't they try to move the whole stock market or start World War III?"

"Because they're young punks and didn't think of that" is a reasonable answer.

Prank hacking would fit with the monetization when combined with statements of "who would be dumb enough" that underestimates stupidity like the whole charge your iPhone in the microwave or Soupy Sales' "send in all of the green paper in your parents wallets" not thinking people would actually do it. Plenty of precedent but easy to see why they would feel no responsibility for anyone mindbogglingly stupid enough to do so.

I guess he gets a hard lesson on how dumb people are on Twitter

yeah cuz a trillion dollar state entity is so strapped for cash it needs to steal 150k of bitcoin too, drawing attention to the scheme.

Well, of course that wouldn't be the move. The move would be to coerce the naive but capable hackers into doing this, and once the payload was delivered, burn them. I don't know what happened, but it's kinda a waste of a huge position, so I don't think it's that far-fetched.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com