17-year-old accused of being mastermind behind major Twitter hack

[Hanno Labuschagne]

17-year-old accused of being mastermind behind major Twitter hack

The alleged mastermind behind the July 15 hack of Twitter accounts of business titans, celebrities and a former president didn’t need sophisticated hacking tools to pierce the company’s security system.

Rather, he convinced an information technology employee at Twitter that he was a colleague who needed login credentials to access the company’s customer support platform, according to law enforcement officials.

It worked, in spectacular fashion.

[Bloomberg]

 

[Napalm2880]

Well done!

 

[chrisc]

It’s usually done like this. By subterfuge, threats, financial considerations, blackmail, befriending someone like this.

Passwords are so secure, that there must be a system which only the login person needs to verify each and every time they log in, much like banks do

The problem is that this is tiresome to augment and administer

 

[Polymathic]

Back in my day kids used to pull stunts like this all the time

 

[markings]

"improving its security protocols to “make them even more sophisticated.” "
The bar is so low that this shouldn't be a problem.
Let the 'perpetrators' return the money and then issue a commendation for the one who thought up the game and played it successfully. Whatever legal expenses there may accrue Twitter should be made to pay it in gratitude for having their poor system exposed.

 

[ponder]

Social engineering has always been the easiest way to gain access.

Social engineering (security) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[TelkomUseless]

Says a lot of Twitter staff falling for social engineering hack...

 

[Gordon_R]

Found guilty, but he did not act alone:

Teen 'mastermind' pleads guilty to celeb Twitter hack

Kim Kardashian West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Barack Obama were all targeted in the attack.

www.bbc.com

 

[Ninja'd]

Back in my day kids used to pull stunts like this all the time

Wargames was just a movie, old timer.

 

[Polymathic]

Wargames was just a movie, old timer.

Hahaha that movie was is older than I am. Funny enough I only watched this movie for the first a couple years ago.

But seriously though growing up, there was a stage where at least once a month a teenager would be in the news for hacking related incidents

 

[hellfire]

His mom is First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons