
Florida Teen Arrested in Twitter Hack - uptown
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/twitter-hack-arrest.html
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azinman2
Only 17 and his life is ruined... what a shame all around. A total
embarrassment to Twitter, luck to the US that it seems that it wasn't foreign
actors, and technical skills that probably could have been put to better use
to eventually make that money legitimately instead all goes down the drain,
and possibly money never returned (?) to those scammed.

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AdmiralAsshat
I'm sure he'll be fine. They'll let him stir in jail for a few years to break
him of the notion of ever doing it again, then he'll get picked up by a three-
letter agency and recruited to do the same kind of work for them as a
condition for getting out of jail early.

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adamnemecek
This doesn't actually happen.

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voidpointercast
Yeah call my a cynic, but if a 17 year old capable of this actually got
caught, It doesn’t seem that hard to do in the first place.

I wonder if someone gave them the exploit

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brbsix
This was phone-based spear phishing, social engineering. There was no exploit.

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geerlingguy
If this teen was the person who did the hack, it would make more sense it was
just a BTC scam. You could do _way_ more impactful (worse) things with the
access he (presumably) had.

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loa_in_
Given my current trust level towards government I find it hard to not think
it's either a sacrificial lamb or a case of a kid claiming it was him and
unexpectedly found himself taken seriously. I find it easy to believe it's a
PR move to delay bad publicity. Worst thing today is we can't even tell that
truth will be uncovered in the future because we have no transparency and no
way to tell what is what.

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brbsix
I'm similarly skeptical of the government, but this is no Lee Harvey Oswald.
There's no dead president. These "double your cash" scams are widespread and
some of the least sophisticated sorts of scams. It was poorly worded and the
website that was intended to give each visitor a unique wallet address (which
would have made block chain analysis difficult) was not even functioning
properly. There was no exploit, it was social engineering via phone. Why would
the government even bother? As others have noted, more sophisticated attackers
could have caused much more damage (manipulated markets, precipitated
political crises, et cetera). The guy was selling Twitter usernames on a forum
that people use to sell accounts. It wasn't just boasting, there are actual
transactions that occurred over Discord and at ogforums.

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xxxtentachyon
It makes total sense in hindsight that the original aim of the hackers was not
some low-netting Bitcoin scam, but it still feels unsatisfying that all they
were after with such elevated access was the sale of high profile usernames.

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detaro
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24011939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24011939)
on front page

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turol
That one is blocked for Europeans.

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kevin_thibedeau
How did he lose control of the $700K? If he had any clue that he was being
investigated why do this?

