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Comment by elchin | Hacker News Reader

Is there a postmortem on how the hack happened?

Twitter employees were duped by social engineering. Hacker gained access to their credentials, used them to get access to internal Twitter tools that allowed them to takeover Accounts. Not very sophisticated but still alarming that random Twitter employees have access to this kind of tool and don't have better internal account security.

> Not very sophisticated

They did not apply social engineering to a random set of Twitter employees. Simply identifying this select subset of employees indicates sophistication.

My point was more that they didn't need to have access to some 0 day exploit to do this. There's been a lot of "conspiracy" type talk online that this was actually a 3 letter agency showing off their Twitter backdoor.

Are you just guessing? I don't see anyone reporting this.

I also highly doubt normal Twitter employees can impersonate any users. I would seriously hope it's less than 100 people with the DB or server access necessary to tweet as someone they don't have auth credentials for.

I believe Twitter themselves reported that.

Edit: "We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/128359184646423347...

Nope, still looking into it, but at first glance it seems someone paid off a Twitter employee to get a hold of some accounts.

Which makes it really concerning, Twitter can essentially impersonate the President and influence the markets, start a war, etc

Which would indicate a terribly lack of security awareness at Twitter. Security of your primary business and customers should not be considered optional.

The most info I have seen thusfar https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-ac...

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