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Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

When you post a tweet, how much information does twitter have about you? An IP adress, what platform you use, etc.

I'm just curious, because Lulzsec posts frequently and I wonder if law enforcement could subpoena twitter in attempts to catch these people.

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During the 'hunt' for Wikileaks the U.S. has subpoenaed Twitter for info about supposed supporters.[1] In the case of Lulzsec this will have very little use though, as they use VPN's to hide their IP [2].

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/twitter/

[2] http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/2011/06/scared-puppies.ht...

they use VPN's to hide their IP

The FBI routinely uses software exploits to install something called CIPAV on the remote client computer to retrieve forensics data and negate the effect of proxies, vpns, tor, etc.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/07/fbi-spyware-how/

Twitter almost assuredly has the ability to push a custom iframe or similar based on who is logged on to support these kinds of government payloads. In the case the wired article references myspace directly assisted.

Surely being more security paranoid than usual should make it harder for an attack like this to succeed, but if the feds get pissed enough it's not unthinkable that they could get access to a targeted zero day to use.

It's pretty much useless if the tunnel is on another machine and/or it's firewalled properly.

It's no secret that the @lulzsec account is controlled by former Anonymous spokesperson Topiary (http://twitter.com/atopiary), whose identity is not publicly known, though it has been anonymously claimed that he or she is Daniel Ackerman Sandberg.

atopiary: "Dear press: I have Russian launch codes, motherfuckers. Come at me bro. I will blow your asses out of the sky you fuckers." lol

I'm sure they aren't connecting to twitter directly.

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