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Comment by donarb | Hacker News Reader

The story has been updated, three people have now been charged, the teen, a man from Orlando and a man from the UK.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21349920/twitter-hack-arr...

> Originally, “Kirk” claimed to be a Twitter employee, according to a Discord chat log

So these guys were able to get into Twitter but they chatted freely on Discord without considering everything would be recorded?

And then they make one of the most public hacks in recent history without considering someone would go through all the logs with all the noise they made?

There is a reason you don't see this type of attack more often, and it's not because it's difficult to do.

It's because social engineering attacks are noisy as heck. Within 30 minutes of them posting these tweets, you can bet the FBI was already on the line with Twitter's security team.

The fact that they chose to do this attack at all demonstrates how amateur they were.

> Sheppard had used a personal driver’s license to verify himself with the Binance and Coinbase cryptocurrency exchanges, and his accounts were found to have sent and received some of the scammed bitcoin.

Didn't even layer the Bitcoin through an anonymiser like Monero and extra Bitcoin wallets. Just sent and received BTC directly to an account linked with photo ID on multiple exchanges. Incredible really!

It's like robbing a bank and then making sure everyone knows you put the money in your personal bank account. If you spend 5 minutes reading about anonymizing Bitcoins you'll find plenty of ways to do it (tumblers, etc).

How can you do a hack that will certainly get you in jail for several years and not even research the most basic techniques to protect yourself? It just doesn't make sense.

If anything I'm amazed at this level of technical incompetence (or is ignorance a better word) from a group of people that hacked twitter...

Criminals are greet examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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