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With so many accounts compromised, the hackers might actually have full access to Twitter's backend. The postmortem would be very interesting. I'll be looking f
by neurostimulant 6y ago
With so many accounts compromised, the hackers might actually have full access to Twitter's backend. The postmortem would be very interesting. I'll be looking forward to it.
Imagine if the hackers timed the intrusion during github outage, and twitter's employees can't deploy a fix for the exploit fast enough because github was down!
- kyleee 6y agoboy I sure hope we get a juicy post mortem, this is quite a scam
- whoisjuan 6y agoAnd it seems that it's still compromised. Tweets get deleted and then they re-appear.
- slezyr 6y ago> All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000! > Only doing this for the next 30 minutes! Enjoy. No, it's hacker's doing, they need to keep timestamps updated
- Narretz 6y ago30 minutes later and it still happens, just after "Elon" posted a normal message. Hopefully most users have caught on to the scam by now.
- vmception 6y agoprobably a social media manager api keys
- MattGaiser 6y agoDo that many accounts use the same social media manager?
- mtzaldo 6y agoI know hootsuite is a very popular app for managing the social media accounts.
- bfm 6y agoAnd their status page shows their integration with Twitter is having issues now https://web.archive.org/web/20200716000356/https://status.hootsuite.com/post/623750375373160449/twitter-publishing-issues https://web.archive.org/web/20200716000356/https://status.ho...
- vmception 6y agoI think many people have try several of them before settling on one for their use case, and don't revoke the OAuth.
- kristofferR 6y agoNo way, it's way too widepread and would be shut down by now. Elon Musk, Barack Obama and Wiz Khalifa just tweeted the scam again this very minute, more than an hour since it started. This is backend access, Twitter can't figure out how to shut it down.
- jacquesm 6y agoThey could have shut these bitcoin giveaway scams down with a single regex a year ago when they first showed up. They let them go and this is the price they will pay. Let's see if someone is going to sue Twitter because 'verified' to be Bill Gates is meaningless now.
- granzymes 6y agoTwitter almost certainly self-hosts GitHub, no?
- one2know 6y agoDon't know, but current corporate dogma is to not host anything, including using third party auth provider which is like giving away their customer list.
- justinmeiners 6y ago> current corporate dogma is to not host anything Do you mean that they prefer using managed services? Or do you mean that the services managed by their internal IT utlize AWS/etc for servers as opposed to on premises.
- one2know 6y agoThey prefer to use managed services through third parties. Even to their detriment as those third parties basically own their customer lists. If for instance the auth provider goes out of businesses the business would end. Same with code, most new companies are using something like gitlab or github. But it's not as dangerous as many people will have a copy of the source code cloned.
- Spooky23 6y agoThe former. It’s pretty insane. Like you are able to launch Adobe Photoshop because Okta says so. :)
- fouc 6y agoMany larger corporations have strict rules on keeping things like their source code in-house, so that means no external services for code reviews or CI, etc.
- kerng 6y agoMaybe a front end/OAuth issue - those are not uncommon either. Will be interesting to learn more. Also begs the question, who is liable in such cases....
- Scoundreller 6y agoCould be front end, since all of these cite "Twitter Web App" as the source. Never anything else (unless you're a low-follower troll).
- CleanCoder 6y agoLiable for the account being compromised? Twitter. Liable for people sending money? People sending money.
- gowld 6y agoHow much will Twitter pay me for it's liability of my hacked account?
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y agoThe same amount you pay them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Geee 6y agoMaybe a popular browser extension? Would explain why it seems to target tech people.
- rvz 6y ago> Imagine if the hackers timed the intrusion during github outage, and twitter's employees can't deploy a fix for the exploit fast enough because github was down! Imagine that. At that point it would be more secure to self-host the code off of GitHub to push that critical fix Twitter sorely needs right now. Its still on going as we type.
- lqet 6y ago> Imagine if the hackers timed the intrusion during github outage, and twitter's employees can't deploy a fix for the exploit fast enough because github was down! Is Twitter really using GitHub internally (even self-hosted)?
- boarnoah 6y agoIs there even a self hosted Github? AFAIK there is no public offering of the sort.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ry4nolson 6y agogithub enterprise i believe can be onprem
- AsyncAwait 6y agoThere's (was?) an on-premises enterprise version.
- dylz 6y agoYes. https://enterprise.github.com/faq https://enterprise.github.com/faq
- cgk 6y agoGithub has offered this for years: https://github.com/enterprise https://github.com/enterprise MIT used it for a long time.
- jacquesm 6y agoIt may be that the github outage is related. Too many companies rely on 3rd party hosted services for their deployment workflow. Even ones you really would not expect.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoIt "feels" like an insider attack (simultaneous compromise of lots of high value accounts) but I agree, it will make for a fascinating post mortem if one is produced.
- neurostimulant 6y agoHmm, how much money this scam would potentially generates? I think the salary of an engineer working on twitter would be higher given how fast this scam would be shut down. Would a twitter employee risk their career to this scam?
- alberts00 6y agoIt might as well be an employee whose devices were compromised.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoIf you can't get caught, it's just some free money... depends on moral compass... Maybe we'll get a leetcode question out of it, how much should you risk your career for after taking a job at a FAANG?
- therein 6y agoMore than 130k, that's for sure. It would have to be orders of magnitude larger.
- swagonomixxx 6y agoThat would be hilarious and full of irony. Given that most FANGers are obsessed with cash, I'm pretty sure they'd say "yes" to risking their career for some sweet BTC.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI would be surprised if it were an engineer, but not everyone who is employed would be an engineer. When I was at Google two fairly high profile incidents were enacted by contractors (one in the IT "TechStop" group and one a data center tech)
- gowld 6y agoTwitter depends on GitHub?
- zelly 6y agoThere is no way Twitter depends on Github CI/CD to push updates. I refuse to believe this.
- sleepybrett 6y agoIf they did, they would be running the self hosted option.
- suzzer99 6y agoThat twitter buildspec.yml must be HUGE!
- brentm 6y agoI wonder if this is hack in the sense that the account passwords were compromised or that the system itself was compromised in a way that would allow the attacker to tweet from any account.
- Darkphibre 6y agoI'd guess that Elon's first reaction would be to change the password. Since it's still happening, it's probably back-end.
- byteshock 6y agoIf they had full access to Twitter’s backend, they probably would be tweeting from accounts like @POTUS or @jack. But this seems like they have access to limited accounts. Most likely gained access to a third party service that allows you to manage your tweets? Edit: they tweeted from the twitter support account. Just wow. They might have actually gotten into Twitter’s systems. Edit 2: To expand on my edit above, I saw multiple tweets from other accounts that showed a screenshot of the scam tweet originating from the twitter support account. I’m not sure if it’s real or not, since they keep deleting the tweets. If it is real that would definitely open doors to more theories. Edit 3: Seems like the twitter support account was a joke. Impossible to tell with everything going on!
- jmkni 6y agoDonald Trump was Tweeting in Farsi earlier, I was seriously on the fence about whether that was a genuine tweet.
- eternalban 6y ago"3 people have been sentenced to death for participating in demonstrations. They could be subject to execution at any moment. This sends a deplorable message to the world and should not occur. #dont_execute" [edit: not sure why this is getting so much silent attention. It is a literal translation of the tweet referenced in OP.]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- benlumen 6y agoYou say they'd target POTUS but of the very high profile accounts it's so far billionaires, corporations and democrat politicians. Does make you wonder.
- Thorentis 6y agoI'm constantly amazed that people who are critical of billionaires and corporations, never wonder why billionaires and corporations are usually democrat supporters.
- libraryatnight 6y agoand yet lots of technical type Twitter personalities tweeting like each individual user got popped. "OMG THEY GOT MR BEAST!" No, they got twitter. I mean its possible, we do not know, but this "They GOT so and so" thing is annoying at this point.
- benlumen 6y agoTotally agree, backend - Musk's tweets being deleted and popping up again before our eyes was a dead giveaway. It could be SQL injection writing tweets directly to the database for all we know. I agree with everyone else saying the site should be pulled. Incredibly sketchy.
- VectorLock 6y agoWrite through caches would need to send the tweets through the normal channels for them to 'fan out' instead of writing directly to MySQL. But essentially what you're saying about possible backend compromise.
- gsich 6y agoSelfhost. If you rely on Github for your service you are rightfully doomed.
- Sebb767 6y agoI'm just glad the fallout from this isn't nuclear, to be honest.
- kelnos 6y ago> ... and twitter's employees can't deploy a fix for the exploit fast enough because github was down! I sincerely doubt Twitter depends on github.com. Github's enterprise version runs on your own infra, self-managed, and if Twitter uses GH at all, that'd be the version they use.
- maps7 6y agoWhy can twitter staff tweet under people's accounts? How does that make sense?
- ragerino 6y agoIt seems like the devs at Twitter are clueless, how this happened. The hackers could be deep in Twitters systems, eventually even have even someone working at Twitter, or it's a result of a new yet unknown password list or phishing attempt.
- ragerino 6y agoJust saw this https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-access-panel-account-hacks-biden-uber-bezos https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-ac... Means they had someone inside Twitter.
- sidcool 6y agoIs the root cause and attack vector known?