Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

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    This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we 
    do not believe it was an isolated incident. The 
    attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we 
    believe other companies and organizations have 
    also been recently similarly attacked.

Anyone have any clue what the possible motives behind this could be? My best guess is someone is trying to mine for private data that may have been sent over DM (Maybe Obama is sending nuke launch codes over DM). Other than that twitter's data is mostly public and I don't see the benefit of carrying out such an attack to simply impersonate Justin Bieber on Twitter. I also don't suspect Twitter to be the type of company that would leave their passwords easily crackable either. Doesn't make sense that were mining for valid emails either, there are cheaper ways of getting access to those.

"HACKED BY CHINESE!!!" is the default assumption.

There are moderate numbers of people who use Twitter for online activism. That would point more to Syria or Iran or another Middle Eastern country, since Twitter is more popular there than in China or the Chinese language.

Nobody hacks Twitter just to get valid emails or impersonate someone. That's ridiculous.

Pretty clearly this was the work of governments e.g. China, Iran who are trying to find out more about political dissidents or the sources of leaks. They are the only ones who would use lucrative exploits against Twitter, NYT, WSJ etc.

So to make this clear, the best guess is these attacks are being done by governments in an effort to find out who is leaking data to Twitter, NYT, etc?

Pretty interesting if you ask me, is it likely the use would sick the best hackers at the NSA if top secret information was being leaked on the bizzaro world's Chinese Twitter? It almost sounds like the prologue to the worlds first CyberWar.

To reiterate what I've been posting elsewhere, I'm sure there is a lot of compromising material in the Direct Messages of certain well-picked accounts, for a wide range of motives.

There is nothing clear about this attack at all, thus it's grossly unfair to cast aspersions on any country or select group of individuals unless there is hard evidence.

Or perhaps US government...

At first i thought the email was phishing but sure enough my acct was reset even with 17 chars. i wonder if Twitter can cull any correlations from this compromised pool, epidemiological-like

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