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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

how about doing something to stop elon musk scams on the platform.

Something as simple as auto-flagging any account that changes its name and picture after posting to elon musk , or if an account changes its name and picture and then subsequently posts to musk, could help. Fase positives are problem with any solution.

But also, the scam is so hard to stop and and so persistent in large part because it is so profitable for the scammer. This creates a great incentive for the scammer to devote considerable effort to evading twitter's efforts to stop it. Just making .1 btc is like a year's worth of wages if you live in a poor country, and people send way more than that. It beats selling v1gra, p0ker, etc. Nothing comes close to it.

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Twitter doesn't take impersonation[0] too lightly. They review accounts that have been flagged as an impersonation account, but still you can create jokey accounts, as per their clause:

> Twitter users are allowed to create parody, newsfeed, commentary, or fan accounts.

You have to have a disclaimer saying the account is a parody to avoid people thinking the account is the real person[1]

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-imper...

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-accoun...

Are they going to do anything about verified accounts changing their names?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/20/twitter-acc...

This seems like the biggest no-brainer to me. You should have to reverify after changing your account name.

It is common to see verified accounts using the name section as a tweet-compose function, often adding jokey phrases in there to confuse people. But yeah, this practice should not be allowed and should be a red flag behavior.

I thought the GP meant scams perpetrated by the actual Elon Musk.

Pretty sure they were talking about verified profiles being hacked, changing their display name and avatar to Musk's, and then replying to Musk's tweet something along the lines of "I'm giving away free crypto, click here".

In my view, 2FA should be a requirement for verification.

There is hacked verified accounts too, but also people setting up jokey accounts without the parody disclaimer pretending to be Musk or other influential people, then asking to 'double your Bitcoin by sending coins here'.

That blue checkmark is fairly unmissable. Handle is lower opacity when looking at a tweet. I have nothing to back it up, but having looked at a few cryotocurrency addresses that I've seen from breached accounts, I'm willing to claim it's far more effective to phish a blue checkmark and pretend to be Musk.

2FA has historicially been broken because it is usually attached to a phone number, and phone service providers are suseptable to social engineering. What twitter (and other websites) should be using is PGP, where the user holds the secret key, and there are separate forms on messages to view PGP signatures, and forms on accounts to view their public keys.

PGP is possibly the only workflow worse than SMS based 2FA for humans.

How so?

I don't even know where to start: backwards compatibility to 90s era crypto, no forward secrecy, a web of trust model that encourages you to have a long-lived key – because with short-lived keys your trust has to be rebuilt after expiry, a cryptosystem that violently leaks metadata...

PGP should've died years ago; there are far better options today.

Depends on how you mean "worse"; PGP is very secure with poor UX, SMS is less secure but honestly decent UX.

Separating UX and "security" from a cryptosystem is impossible. Poor UX leads directly to security vulnerabilities.

Heck, we've seen that in library code: your AES implementation may be sound, but if the library interfaces make it easy to reuse an IV, or use a null IV[1], you have a broken cryptosystem.

[1]: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-5408

Convincing non-techies to use GPG just occasionally is going to backfire pretty quickly.

And I say this as someone who works at a journalist organization where if your editor catches you not using it, you're definitely gonna get scolded.

Software 2FA is much easier to enforce.

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