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No where in the article it mentions how did they nail him or how did he do. With Twitter saying that this entire process was done by social engineering some emp
by amrrs 6y ago
No where in the article it mentions how did they nail him or how did he do. With Twitter saying that this entire process was done by social engineering some employee and then gaining system access of others by monitoring the process - this seems to have been done by someone with Corporate process understanding and hard to believe it could be a 18 yold.
- ceejayoz 6y agoSocial engineering is well within the capabilities of many 18 year olds, and plenty of them will have experience with corporate-style processes at school.
- devenblake 6y agoIt's doubtful that he actually did it. Probably just a teen groomed by a cracking group; the group gets away with the deed by leaving a paper trail pointing to the teen (that will get a reduced prison sentence) and the teen gets PR which will inevitably lead to a well-paying job.
- bdamm 6y agoI'm with you on this, he's probably a fall guy who's "caught" because he "confessed" or something like that. Two reasons for this; one, Twitter isn't exactly the kind of joint you stroll into and take over, it's not really an amateur operation and people are attacking it all the time. Second, coordinating all this work is not a simple one-person job. The timing of the attack suggests lots of coordination, practice, or both. Could one kid do it? Maybe, but highly improbable. And if it turns out this kid did do it, the CIA is going to find a way to own his ass basically forever.
- jacquesm 6y agoIf you are not 100% perfect in your opsec as a wannabe hacker you will get caught. It takes just one small slip-up.
- pier25 6y agoTotally, but opening a bitcoin account with your license driver and moving stolen bitcoins there without any anonymization is another thing altogether.
- jacquesm 6y agoIt may be a surprise to you but criminals are usually stupid. If they were smart you wouldn't realize they are there at all. Think about it: this idiot had access at a level that nation states secret services can only dream of and went for $100K in lousy bitcoins.
- pier25 6y agoI know, which is why it doesn't make sense. If you're so stupid how can you social engineer your way into Twitter?
- jacquesm 6y agoBecause at Twitter a couple of people did not pay attention. Social engineering is the very low hanging fruit of hacking. People are so much more vulnerable than well designed systems, this has been proven over and over again.
- otterley 6y agoLaw enforcement rarely advertises investigative techniques and sources, even in open court. Some amount of evidence they do have was already presented to a grand jury, and will be brought to bear at trial if the defendant doesn't plead out.
- tptacek 6y agoTeenagers broke into phone switches through social engineering for sport in the 1990s.
- YinglingLight 6y agoYep. This isn't Fake News. It's Misinformation for reasons we can only speculate.
- brudgers 6y agoSeems to me that a person sophisticated enough to social engineer Twitter employees is probably sophisticated enough to social engineer a Tampa teen into place for taking a fall. To me state level targets suggest state level actors and Twitter has been mucking about with state level political operations since at least the Arab Spring almost a decade ago. Twitter has a lot of powerful people and organizations who have suffered discomfort at its hands. It is hard to swallow the thesis that a Tampa teen succeeded where intelligence agencies have failed despite years of efforts.
- dylan604 6y agoTeenagers social engineer their parents and teachers on a daily basis. Their success rate is higher than either parents or teachers would like to admit.