The President's account might also have extra safe guards against hacks.

Just like Obama's, right?

The risk of compromise of the sitting president's account poses a much greater threat than does that of a former one. Also, the prominence of Twitter as a means for a head of state to communicate official policy came much further in prominence during the current president's term than before.

Also I'd guess that hijacking the sitting President's twitter would make the hack much worse in a legal sense. Plus now you've pissed off the president who will make especially sure your life becomes he'll.

Obama has a huge following (larger than Trump in fact) and I can think of a couple of tweets by that account that would have led to some serious trouble.

I agree, this looks like the most probable real reason for the hack

Whose private DMs would have as much impact as campaign emails did, and aren’t verified though? That’s the thing that raises so many questions for me - they only exfiltrated the data on accounts that aren’t verified.

On Trump, apparently he has more internal protections on his account than normal so it could just be that the employees they got in through didn’t have any access. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/technology/twitter-hack-i...

>Whose private DMs would have as much impact as campaign emails did, and aren’t verified though? That’s the thing that raises so many questions for me - they only exfiltrated the data on accounts that aren’t verified.

Verified doesn't necessarily mean important people, but rather public personality/official account. There could be hundreds of lobbyists, journalists, etc. that don't use verified accounts.

> Exfiltrating DMs seems like it's going to accomplish just about as much, if not more.

Nobody is communicating anything valuable over Twitter. This is such a ridiculous point that people bring up all the time. Scandalous relationships? Most of that will be on true messenger applications. Business deals? Business email. Many more mainstream prominent people don't even run their own account.

It's not that everyone is so security-minded, it's just that Twitter is an extremely inconvenient way to maintain personal relationships.

> I think the Bitcoin scam was also the perfect innocuous cover story

There is almost no value in DMs. Funny seeing HN speculate about these elite hackers selling them as if there's any market for them, let alone one that would pay $100k+.

> Nobody is communicating anything valuable over Twitter. This is such a ridiculous point that people bring up all the time. Scandalous relationships? Most of that will be on true messenger applications. Business deals? Business email. Many more mainstream prominent people don't even run their own account.

GP was talking about the 2016 election, where Julian Assange and Roger Stone literally communicated strategies, for how to coordinate if the FBI came down on Assange for the leaks, via Twitter DMs. Many things going on with no Signal, PGP, etc.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-reveals-roger-stone-was-...

Just wondering, how do you prove the authenticity of the DMs if they have no cryptographic signatures? I'd be very hard. Even is some are authentic, some messages could be altered / planted, there is no way you could trust screenshots too.

> On 4 October, 2016, Mr Stone tweeted: “Payload coming. #Lockthemup.”

It was clear publicly that Stone had a very inappropriate relationship with Wikileaks. What would you do, attempt to extort Stone for more than $100k and hope he pays? Leak little more than was publicly known?

No, if you were a bad actor looking to cause chaos for a target, you would gather all such things and release it. Either way, that example disproves your claim that nothing sensitive would be discussed of Twitter DM's.

I don't mean this in any kind of condescending way, but I honestly think you might be in a bubble. If I was only looking at my immediate friend group, I would think the same way, as none of them use Twitter DMs at all. However, I recently met up with some old acquaintances from high school, and they use Twitter DMs and Instagram DMs as one of their main methods of communication.

There's a reason "slide into the DMs" is a saying: https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/slide-into-the-dms/

Yes, introductions get made on Twitter, "slide into the DMs" does not mean that you're trying to conduct a three year romantic relationship on it. Usually people are going to get off it, and onto a real messenger application, even if they just want sex.

Again, I think you're in a bubble. I have met large groups of people that do exactly that.

It's also worth mentioning that it's very common for companies and celebrities to use Twitter DMs as a sort of "customer support" where they specifically ask people to send them private information via DM. I've seen tweets from utility companies where they say "Please send us a DM with your account number and we will look into your issue" [0], for example. There's the possibility for valuable information there.

0: https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/1284358479835258881

I communicate with (counts) 4 people regular over Instagram DM. These are people I know IRL, people I have other means of messaging. For me, and from what I can tell some of my friends as well, I’m constantly switching between messaging apps for even the same person. If JS posted an Instagram story and I want to talk about it, then I just start the conversation in Instagram and this turns into a continuation of our conversation elsewhere. If I want to ask someone if they want to get food my first instinct is to open Messages/SMS but if I’ve recently (like same day) chatted with them over Facebook Messenger then I just open that app instead. I couldn’t give a damn which app I use because it’s all the same to me.

Edit: The person I would consider my “best friend” we chat 100% over Instagram DM. This is a person that I can invite myself over for dinner to, that’s how close we are in case you feel like assuming we must not be good friends if we don’t just call each other or whatever. Another of my good friends, we switch between iMessages and WhatsApp I’d say 50/50, just depending on if I’m already in WhatsApp talking to someone else and decide to message her too or not.

99.9% of the email hacks was uninteresting. 0.1% was nothingburger. That wouldn’t stop it from dominating in the media, especially with a trickle feed strategy. Google the whole ‘Spirit Cooking’ thing as a good example. Completely nothing. 0% interesting. Stupid enough to be idle Twitter DM chat. Did it hit the media just before the election and blow up? Yup.