
Twitter: Hackers Accessed Private Messages for Elite Accounts - LinuxBender
https://threatpost.com/twitter-hackers-private-messages-elite-accounts/157657/
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olyjohn
Now the FBI is investigating. If it was the same amount of accounts for
regular users, who want to bet this would already be swept under the rug?

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justwalt
Well sure, but doesn’t that seem sensible? The consequences are greater when
the accounts are those that belong to people with a lot of power.

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starfallg
Looking at the direction that application design is moving towards right now
with centralisation of user information into data storage in the cloud, this
will only get worse. Just needs a small exploitable vector exposed (whether
human or machine) to result in another mass data leak.

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sillysaurusx
The antidote is to pretend everything you say to a computer is public record.

That’s not reasonable, of course, but having it in mind changes your behavior.

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dividedbyzero
This isn't feasible, not even remotely. I work from home, do I just stop doing
my job? Because I cannot possibly work under such an assumption, at all. I can
pretend to, but there is way enough that I must communicate that really should
not become public. A lot of other people are in the same boat I guess,
especially these days.

Also, not sending anything remotely personal through my phone would make it
very, very hard to keep in touch with friends and family. I can't travel to
see all of them all the time, and Covid makes meeting the local ones really
difficult, too.

I don't think it's constructive to cast huge societal issues as individual
failings, with remedies that are absurdly impractical. That only helps to
perpetuate the problem.

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anoonmoose
I think you're really over-estimating how much of what you say would be bad if
it were public record, to be honest.

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paulcole
Also the fact that if literally everything everyone said on a computer was
public record it'd be so noisy and such a mess nobody would bother looking at
what random average people are saying.

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jngreenlee
Perhaps all this was a type of "burn it down", punk activism, and it will be
released on twitter for public download. The BTC could have been their funding
mechanism. Not for profit, but for the lolz in an election year?

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saas_sam
A subset of these messages could be leaked to produce very different optics.
Say, only leak the wildest messages sent to certain celebrities or politicians
in order to create the perception that their fanbase is purely of that kind,
while holding back the more reasonable messages that may make up the majority.

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slg
Let's not forget this is almost exactly what happened during the 2016
election. Both the RNC and DNC were hacked.[1] The RNC data simply was never
leaked. There are multiple reasons why that might have been the case.

[1] - [https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-
ha...](https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked-
russia/index.html)

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zionic
Isn't this quiet dishonest? IIRC a single RNC dude got hacked and his years-
old personal outlook got stolen. Meanwhile the DNC had _everything_ get pwned
right at the server.

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slg
You remember incorrectly. It was a server used by two of the most prominent
GOP Senators not a "years-old personal outlook" from a "single RNC dude". Per
the NYT[1]

>Federal investigators, speaking on background, have said that a single email
server used by that contractor had been penetrated. But it was going out of
service, and contained outdated material that the Russians probably found of
little value. People with direct knowledge of the server’s contents said it
had been used by Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain.

Maybe nothing of value was on that server. The general public has no way of
knowing because the data was never leaked.

And even if the emails themselves didn't provide any incriminating
information, I think controversies like pizzagate have shown that even leaks
of mundane data can have political repercussions.

[1] - [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/russia-
hack-h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/russia-hack-hearing-
clapper-rogers-brennan.html)

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y-c-o-m-b
I'm not a Twitter user so pardon my ignorance, but do people actually use
Twitter DM for personal/sensitive conversations on a regular basis?

I was always under the impression that the majority of people use text,
whatsapp/telegram, or facebook for those kinds of discussions.

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andrewnicolalde
Most people probably have no idea they should be using a particular platform
for any sort of discussion:/

