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Twitter: Hackers Accessed Private Messages for Elite Accounts
- jngreenlee 6y agoPerhaps all this was a type of "burn it down", punk activism, and it will be released on twitter for public download. The BTC could have been their funding mechanism. Not for profit, but for the lolz in an election year?
- starfallg 6y agoLooking at the direction that application design is moving towards right now with centralisation of user information into data storage in the cloud, this will only get worse. Just needs a small exploitable vector exposed (whether human or machine) to result in another mass data leak.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoThe antidote is to pretend everything you say to a computer is public record. That’s not reasonable, of course, but having it in mind changes your behavior.
- xiphias2 6y agoThe problem with this is that socializing moved to be digital, especially with COVID-19. Pseudonyms help a little bit, but it's still easy for an attacker to know who you really are.
- starfallg 6y agoThe mass usage of pseudonyms has the drawback of facilitating the spread of 'bad' information in such a model though. The web-of-trust breaks down with the prevalence of pseudonymous throwaway accounts (which can also be farmed, like on Reddit).
- dividedbyzero 6y agoThis isn't feasible, not even remotely. I work from home, do I just stop doing my job? Because I cannot possibly work under such an assumption, at all. I can pretend to, but there is way enough that I must communicate that really should not become public. A lot of other people are in the same boat I guess, especially these days. Also, not sending anything remotely personal through my phone would make it very, very hard to keep in touch with friends and family. I can't travel to see all of them all the time, and Covid makes meeting the local ones really difficult, too. I don't think it's constructive to cast huge societal issues as individual failings, with remedies that are absurdly impractical. That only helps to perpetuate the problem.
- anoonmoose 6y agoI think you're really over-estimating how much of what you say would be bad if it were public record, to be honest.
- paulcole 6y agoAlso the fact that if literally everything everyone said on a computer was public record it'd be so noisy and such a mess nobody would bother looking at what random average people are saying.
- ssalka 6y agoAnd hopefully a mass exodus, as decentralized alternatives start to become more viable :)
- uniqueid 6y agoI'll stick with my $5 thumbdrive.
- vinniejames 6y agoThat works until you lose your keychain :/
- uniqueid 6y agoMy prophesy is that someday we'll wake up, some day in the near future, to news of a massive breach of Gmail data, and it will be the death knell for keeping personal data "in the cloud." What we are doing as an industry now, by encouraging that, is irresponsible.
- saas_sam 6y agoA subset of these messages could be leaked to produce very different optics. Say, only leak the wildest messages sent to certain celebrities or politicians in order to create the perception that their fanbase is purely of that kind, while holding back the more reasonable messages that may make up the majority.
- giarc 6y agoIt's unlikely that celebrities and politicians allow DMs from any account. I think that setting is off by default.
- slg 6y agoLet's not forget this is almost exactly what happened during the 2016 election. Both the RNC and DNC were hacked.[1] The RNC data simply was never leaked. There are multiple reasons why that might have been the case. [1] - https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked-russia/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-ha...
- Natsu 6y ago> Comey said there was no sign "that the Trump campaign or the current RNC was successfully hacked." Sounds like they got nothing interesting.
- slg 6y agoThe most important word in that quote is "current". The RNC was hacked, but it was "old" data. That data was never leaked. It isn't known exactly what time frames constitute "old" and "current" in this context. Maybe the data wasn't leaked because it didn't have value. That is one of those multiple reasons I alluded to in the previous post. There are also several less optimistic reasons why that data wouldn't have been leaked.
- Natsu 6y agoTrue, but given that Strzok's own notes were recently released and they'd found no coordination with Russia at all, it reads like a conspiracy theory.
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoI'm thousand times persuaded that THE MESSAGES ARE EPIC!!!!!!!!!!!!! REACHING THE CATEGORY OF UNCONSTITUTIONALITY. :D SHARE THEM ALL, SHOW US!!!!!!
- olyjohn 6y agoNow the FBI is investigating. If it was the same amount of accounts for regular users, who want to bet this would already be swept under the rug?
- justwalt 6y agoWell sure, but doesn’t that seem sensible? The consequences are greater when the accounts are those that belong to people with a lot of power.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- y-c-o-m-b 6y agoI'm not a Twitter user so pardon my ignorance, but do people actually use Twitter DM for personal/sensitive conversations on a regular basis? I was always under the impression that the majority of people use text, whatsapp/telegram, or facebook for those kinds of discussions.
- andrewnicolalde 6y agoMost people probably have no idea they should be using a particular platform for any sort of discussion:/