I think a lot of people are missing the forest from the trees in this discussion. The real interesting question is not how he got hacked, it's why it doesn't ha

I think a lot of people are missing the forest from the trees in this discussion. The real interesting question is not how he got hacked, it's why it doesn't happen more often? None of the tricks listed in the article are particularly time sensitive, the fundamental patterns behind this hack go back at least several years and they relate to fundamental design interactions between complex systems that are difficult to impossible to change. So given all this, why him? why now? The answer doesn't have anything to do with how he should have set up 8 factor authentication or how he should have had a Swahili-numeric password. The answer is that his hacker had extremely atypical motivations and that's the reason his life got destroyed. The goal of this hacker was to pwn this guy's short, valuable twitter account. It's unlikely there's really any other hacker in the world who has that goal which is why such attacks are so rare. For most hackers, there's some sort of rational ROI calculation and if the ROI is negative, the hack isn't worth doing. Nerds often have a hard time seeing that security is a holistic system. It's often comprised of many flawed layers that are layered in depth to provide a statistically secure system. In real life, security comes from being able to push down the ROI through institutional mechanisms rather than personal ones. Credit cards are designed to be stolen and recovered from, investigations are able to target key players in the field and tough penalties means that the negative effects outweigh the positive gains. All this has lead to a black market rate of merely $2 - $3 per stolen credit card, meaning that there's not much motivation to hack in the first place. Nerds naturally have a libertarian bent which makes them more inclined to believe encryption and technology is the solution to the problem when, in reality, it's a beefed up police state and American hegemonic decisions that can span the globe.