Hackers concerned within the high-profile hijacking of Twitter accounts earlier this week have been younger friends with no hyperlinks to state or organised crime, The New York Occasions reported Friday. The assault, which Twitter and federal police are investigating, began with a playful message between hackers on the platform Discord, a chat service widespread with avid gamers, in accordance with the Occasions. The paper mentioned it had interviewed 4 individuals who participated within the hacking, who shared logs and screenshots backing up their accounts of what occurred.
“The interviews point out that the assault was not the work of a single nation like Russia or a classy group of hackers,” the Occasions reported.
“As a substitute, it was completed by a bunch of younger individuals – certainly one of whom says he lives at dwelling together with his mom – who received to know each other due to their obsession with proudly owning early or uncommon display screen names, significantly one letter or quantity, like @y or @6.”
The huge hack of high-profile customers from Elon Musk to Joe Biden has raised questions on Twitter’s safety because it serves as a megaphone for politicians forward of November’s election.
“Based mostly on what we all know proper now, we consider roughly 130 accounts have been focused by the attackers in a roundabout way as a part of the incident,” Twitter mentioned in a tweet.
“For a small subset of those accounts, the attackers have been capable of achieve management of the accounts after which ship Tweets from these accounts.”
Posts attempting to dupe individuals into sending hackers the digital foreign money bitcoin have been tweeted by the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and lots of others on Wednesday.
Twitter mentioned it gave the impression to be a “coordinated social engineering assault by individuals who efficiently focused a few of our workers with entry to inner methods and instruments.”
‘Unique Gangster’ accounts
Fraudulent posts, which have been largely deleted, mentioned individuals had 30 minutes to ship $1,000 in cryptocurrency bitcoin, promising they might obtain twice as a lot in return. Greater than $100,000 price of bitcoin was despatched to electronic mail addresses talked about within the tweets, in accordance with Blockchain.com, which screens crypto transactions.
The younger hackers interviewed by the Occasions mentioned a mysterious person who glided by the title “Kirk” initiated the scheme with a message and was the one with entry to Twitter accounts.
They contended they have been solely concerned in commandeering lesser-known Twitter accounts, significantly to swipe coveted quick handles resembling an “@” signal and single letters or numbers that might simply be bought, in accordance with the report.
The younger hackers maintained they stopped serving as middlemen for “Kirk” when high-profile accounts turned targets.
Some hackers are “obsessed” with hijacking “Unique Gangster” social media accounts staked out within the companies’ early days which have quick profile names, in accordance with Brian Krebs of Krebs on Safety.
“Possession of those OG accounts confers a measure of standing and perceived affect and wealth in SIM swapping circles, as such accounts can typically fetch 1000’s of when resold within the underground,” Krebs mentioned in a put up.
Hackers concerned within the assault on Twitter marketed account names at an OGusers.com web site, asking for cost in bitcoin, in accordance with the Occasions report.
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