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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

Except Twitter didn't get hacked.

Kevin Mitnick is crying somewhere...

the only hack Kevin Mitnick ever pulled was convincing people he was a hacker.

Reading through his charges[0] regardless of what we here consider that he has done, his criminal conviction seems to imply he was considered a "hacker" by the law.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick

The words "hack" and "hacker" are cognates, but both words have evolved over time, and not all senses of the word "hacker" describe someone who produces hacks. Social engineers and script kiddies can absolutely fit under the umbrella, too, and that's been the case for roughly a quarter century now. Perhaps longer.

"Produces hacks" this isn't even a thing.

Can people please stop commenting on HN threads pretending to know about hacking and making false claims.

Producing hacks is a thing, even if the phrase itself is not common, and it's a thing that people were doing long before hacking/hacker had even taken on the sense of breaking into computers.

Look, there are really only two general approaches to arguing over the dictionary: Trotskyism (i.e., permanent revolution), and joining with the forces of evil.

Sounds like someone is jealous of him. He was clearly a hacker.

Did it get cyberattacked, then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2020_Twitter_bitcoin_scam...

Semantics, no? Someone gained unauthorized access.

I think the prev. comment is accurate in the sense that Mastodon can easily be vulnerable to social engineering attacks, because as long as humans run it, humans are going to make mistakes. To be super clear, any (chat/microblogging/etc) software is going to be vulnerable to social eng attacks.

In most cases, I do consider gaining authorized access via social engineering to be a hack. I guess this probably qualifies, but just barely. If it turns out it was just a rogue engineer then it doesn't qualify at all. It's not clear that external "hackers" gained ongoing access. If someone leveraged an insecure remote worker's PC to gain access, that counts as hacking too. I'll wait and see if we find out what the root cause was.

The hack is exploiting weak internal security controls that twitter has. Reset of email for so many high profile users requiring only one person to click a button is weak design. No Review / no approval etc .

Also the amount of time for them to identify it, they had blocked tweeting the address and blocked all verified users from posting before they could find the rogue account indicates logging and analysis of their admin tool actions is also not robust.

Exploiting these two vulnerabilities whether by blackmail, bribe or RAT should not make a difference to consider it a hack

Yes it did.

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