Doubi is a blogger sharing GFW circumvention tips, like easy-to-use installing scripts for VPS, tutorials, reviews and a list of donated free acounts. Before his arrest, his blog had been under attack, domain names blocked.
The phone number thing is very dangerous, twitter bascially won't allow you to use it after a while if you don't provide a valid phone number.
Police monitoring: https://twitter.com/tianlan/status/936909920334528513 https://twitter.com/midiexiang6555/status/117813328167558348...
Fried-rice festival, commemorating the day Mao's only son was spotted and bombed in North Korea while out cooking fried-rice. https://twitter.com/tianlan/status/1198841340865331200
If I was China, I'd go for this. Twitter has thousands of employees, many of which can surely be turned with some pressure. Also many who has family in China that can be used for leverage.
Of course, if I'm China, I can try it with enough people to get several assets.
Also, of the offer includes "we won't kill your grandma", uptake might be higher.
Turning someone is rarely an upfront request.
You make friends with them and make small talk about politics to see if there are any sympathies to your cause.
Ask for a small favor and see if they'll do it, then progress slowly. You only ask them to break the law once they're already on your side.
> MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego or Extortion (depending on source)
> RASCLS: Reciprocation, Authority, Scarcity, Commitment and Consistency, Liking, and Social Proof.
In general, most companies want to scope SOX as narrowly as possible. So if you can, only things that your auditors think will affect revenue reporting.
Querying ads performance data? Sure, we'll SOXify it. Querying user accounts writ large? "Meh, our engineers need to be productive."
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777352750/how-saudi-arabia-us...
I’ve worked for lots of SOX companies as a third party and had root/sqlplus on most of them. There’s really to relationship between SOX and security.
If it was from the inside more likely a privileged user was compromised. It could also explain why Twitter is being quiet, especially if the investigation is ongoing.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777352750/how-saudi-arabia-us...
It's not like they get l337 h4xx0rs to pwn their internal systems; they probably just have login credentials or permissions they shouldn't have, which aren't audited, and they can sneak things out in plain sight.
> API hole explanation is excluded as people with 100% private accs got police visits.
Still, thanks for sharing, that's hell of a story. I don't speak Chinese and have no idea what's ShadowSocksR and why this Doubi guy was so hated by Chinese govt for that. Would appreciate more details.
Doubi was one of main developers of Shadowsocks, a traffic obfuscation tool to jump the Chinese firewall.
As said, the guy openly defied Chinese 3 letter services for years, and even trolled a number of agents whom he managed deanonymise himself.
Twitter needs a whistleblower/leaker at this point.
I don't know about any other allegations but this is wrong. GDPR revenue penalties don't apply to breaches.
Can this be an API leak which Chinese MSS used to track Chinese users?
It may well as be if we believe that API wasn't implementing discoverability restrictions from privacy settings, and only hid users on the UI level.
> Basically Twitter got pwned big time, and now denies it because GDPR will ruin them if breach is proven. Here is what Doubi's online followers figured:
> State security got all phone numbers used for Twitter phone verification up to May 2019 and possibly till July.
> Twitter haphazardly closed the breach in complete secrecy.
> API hole explanation is excluded as people with 100% private accs got police visits.
> People with foreign SIM cards also got into trouble. So the explanation that China compromised Twitter's SMS providers is also excluded, as its improbable that they did it in 4+ countries.
> 2016 breach is also out of question.
> The only explanation is that they got hold on a big piece of their user DB, or, worse, they have an active infiltrator in Twitter, or Twitter voluntarily cooperated.