This is by far the most eyebrow-raising part of the update. To take over such a large number of verified accounts and then run a download on only eight non-verified ones seems almost impossible to have been anything other than targeted.

The original idea that the bitcoin scam was a diversion starts to look more plausible in this light, but in the absence of any information about the downloaded accounts, there’s really no way to guess what their value may have been and to whom.

Alternately, to throw cold water on the above, maybe the process to kick off a download for verified accounts has extra safeguards and the eight non-verified were simply tests to try to determine why the verified downloads weren’t working.

The idea that someone would opt out of downloading Elon masks or Jeff bezos’ DMs is insane. Completely and perfectly insane. Not to mention the other people. Even if just in terms of profit, clearly the dms of the richest man in the world have enough value to just click download. It seems like the probability of this guy passing it up due to lack of interest is very small. Slightly more likely is that he was overwhelmed by the massive implications of having this access and simply didn’t think to do it in the rush to do something before his source chickened out or realized what was going on. And most likely to me is that he simply couldn’t do it because of a higher level of security associated with verified accounts, hence why none of the accounts were verified. He wasn’t able to do anything with trumps twitter so I suspect that for certain high profile accounts, there is a much higher level of security that this guys source couldn’t override.

I'm not sure what you're thinking, but it's perfectly reasonable.

People like you're talking about don't communicate anything of value over twitter. Bezos only follows his ex-wife who doesn't follow him back, barely uses twitter and would be unlikely to have any DMs at all. After the saudi hack, I would be surprised if he has much of anything installed on his phone.

The only real reason to hack celebrity accounts in this instance, and which they should have done, would be to deflect attention from the accounts they actually went after.

I wouldn't be so sure with Musk, for example. He even met his partner via DM.

Yeah, Musk spends a lot of time on Twitter, his DMs are def loaded, but I also agree that Bezos' is definitely empty. Still, I'm sure there are some verified accounts they would've downloaded the data from if they could, so it makes me think they couldn't easily.

> Bezos only follows his ex-wife who doesn't follow him back

I honestly didn't believe you. But it's true. That's... kinda weird.

Probably a dead account he no longer access it before divorce, hence the awkward status

Hmm, I don't think so. The account has tweeted as recently as Feb of this year, but his divorce was finalized in July 2019.

I always thought high profile accounts are run by media teams. I doubt the account owners know the credentials themselves or have direct access in most cases.

I’m pretty positive Elon’s account is NOT run by a media team :D

His media team works behind the counter at the pot dispensary.

If you think Musk or Trump have any sense of restraint, much less opsec, do I ever have a bridge to sell you.

Where do you think you will find more info -- the DMs of a PR account or the someone's private alt? Or the DMs of a twitter celebrity or the DMs of a hedge fund manager or member of the board of directors of a bank?

I suspect that hedge fund managers and bank board members are considerably less likely to use DMs as a means of primary communication than Twitter celebrities. Private alt accounts would be very interesting, but you'd need to know who they are....

I'm unfamiliar with Twitter's interface but, isn't it entirely possible that things like DMs are available (when you're able to log in as the account in question) and scrape-able without directly using the "download twitter data" tool?

the it's even weirder because this looks something that required a certain amount of planning

It's also possible that the attackers were unsophisticated and they downloaded data for real-life acquaintances for emotional reasons.

It seems like a sophisticated attacker running a targeted attack such as a government agency would presumably have avoided doing anything noticeable like the public tweets in the hope of being able to avoid detection and target additional people in the future.

I think in cases like this I would rest easier if law enforcement always probed, targetting not the hackers (because I don't think that helps), but the company complicit in victimizing its users. Those companies have an extreme amount of power&knowledge, and should be held to extremely high standards as a result.

> in the absence of any information about the downloaded accounts, there’s really no way to guess what their value may have been and to whom

One possibility I can think of is that a state actor, such as China, was investigating state enemies, such as suspected dissidents. They wanted to get the DMs, but also didn't want the general public to catch on. So they set things up so public discourse would be centered around the Bitcoin scam and celebrity hacks.

If it was a state actor, they'd definitely want access to elon musk's DMs. He hasn't showed a ton of restraint in social media, and he's the CEO of a rocket company that has done some classified launches. And many of these verified users that were hacked have significant roles internationally, whether in trade like with amazon or politically like biden, or with international aid organizations like gates.

Depends on the organization I guess. I can imagine some orgs only caring about internal affairs and not gathering international Intel.

> The original idea that the bitcoin scam was a diversion starts to look more plausible in this light,

This is still absurd to me. What diversion? Twitter knows exactly what was downloaded, and in fact they’re looking at this even closer due to the supposed diversion.

What if the 8 accounts were people who might plausibly know who Satoshi is.

I think the hackers were going after OG accounts that were single, two-character, or common first name usernames. Many OG accounts aren’t verified.

Why would anyone care about the DM history of OG accounts? I believe that it is more likely to be politically motivated.

I could imagine a teenage hacker downloading his friend's or enemy's DMs. People the hacker knows in real life may be more interesting for him.

Why do we assume it's a young person doing the hacking?

Because it's becoming increasingly hard to explain this hack otherwise.

Imagine you walk by the beach, and see that the sea has washed up a pirate treasure chest. You crack it open, and see it full of gold, jewelry, old manuscripts, letters. Would you just throw the chest back into the sea, taking only a single ring, and a nail from the chest to hang a price list on your lemonade stand with?

Because that's what happened here. The attackers hit gold, and threw it all away.

After reading Krebs' initial take on the incident[0], I think a plausible explanation is that whoever created the hack isn't the person who exploited the hack.

The hacker managed to get an amazing level of access, but exploiting that, and extracting value from it, and getting away clean is probably really hard. So they sold the access to whoever was willing to pay for it for a guaranteed return. That also gives you an extra middleman that law enforcement has to get past before they get to you, and confusing the trail between the middleman and you might be easier than confusing the trail between your targets and you.

Except whoever paid for the access and used the exploit just didn't have the imagination to do something that made as full use of the hack as they might have done. And now dozens of other criminals are facepalming themselves to death for not having been the ones to have bought this opportunity for their own ends, which they think would have been much more epic.

[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/whos-behind-wednesdays-e...

More like the attackers rifled through the chest to find the map of the real treasure, leaving the meaningless trinkets behind.

What "real treasure"? It's hard to beat the opportunity to do large-scale stock market manipulation, play some ninja geopolitics, or even download private messages of rich and influential VIPs. And that's the opportunity the attackers didn't take.

That's what is being reported, e.g.: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/technology/twitter-hacker...

Seeing if there were any previous offers made to buy an OG handle - to gauge a good selling-price for the name, perhaps?

Collecting potential ammo for later blackmail so they can get the OG username?

But if they were going after OG accounts to resell them, would they really want to cause such a huge fuss that would have Twitter carefully examine the audit trail and undo the hackers' actions?

What if the 8 non-verified accounts are alt-accounts used by celebs/VIPs for personal communication?

Let us imagine that I am Jeff Bezos, why would I use my official account to DM people? I would rather use one where I look like everybody so that it is less likely to be the target of an attack.

Would having access to the verified account somehow tell you what the alt account name is though?

It’s definitely possible. Boy detection will use the number of accounts coming from a single source as a signal. High-profile alt accounts are probably whitelisted so they’re not flagged by accident.

Someone pointed out that it could be targeted at activists...

That is exactly my worry the moment I saw they were not verified. Nation state could drop a grand per account and get data on 8 activists no problem.

Not $8k right? $1k per hacked account - which would thousands + the narrow targets?

The NYTb article says they were selling accounts initially for $1-1.5k before trying the Bitcoin scam

Hmmm, if we want to assume this is still related to high-profile blackmail material, it's possible they were downloading the DMs from accounts messaged by verified accounts.

AFAIK, deleting Twitter DMs only deletes the conversation from your end, so if the verified user, worried about this exact situation, periodically deletes their DMs, but the unverified user, not nearly so worried, doesn't...

Verified accounts probably require a waiting time before downloading the data. I guess the attackers ran a web scraper on the verified accounts.

What if powerful people have pseudonymous accounts that are not verified?

One thing is that it might be trying to get data from OG names to easier guess their passwords?

Its absolutely ridiculous that Twitter does not have end to end encryption of DMs yet. To think that they once hired Moxie/Whisper Systems and could have been miles ahead of everyone else on this. It's purely negligence at this stage.

While I do agree with you I don't see how this would have helped unless it is encrypted with a key Twitter doesn't have (ie. encrypted in the client with something else than the password). I highly doubt we will see that happen.

What does this even mean? The attackers had the users' credentials, by resetting them. They had all the access the users had. There is no kind of encryption that would prevent them reading the messages in this situation.

Twitter is fundamentally a web app. Users can log in from any browser and read their messages, which are stored on the server. This is a very different situation from Signal or WhatsApp, where an account is tied to a device, and messages can be stored there.

Why has no one considered the possibility that Twitter is lying about this part?

The only reason someone wouldn't do this is if they didn't want the heat and if they didn't want the heat they wouldn't have hijacked high profile accounts to begin with.

"In cases where an account was taken over by the attacker, they may have been able to view additional information"

They say it but downplay it very much.

Obviously this means the attackers had access to DMs.