whatbrentsay

Today, Twitter was hacked.

I spent most of my evening following the developing news, trying to find something that looked like truth in a sea of speculation. When I couldn't find that, I wrote down what I had learned and what seemed safe to believe. Midway through, I checked Twitter's support account to source a tweet and noticed they tweeted a rough play-by-play describing what happened ten minutes prior. Today, Twitter was hacked... and I was also too slow.

You can read about what happened directly from the horse's mouth: the aforementioned thread from Twitter support covers it nicely. The short of it is Twitter employee accounts were compromised via some kind of social engineering attack. There was no detail given about the exact technique used, but I've worked at multiple companies who have been compromised via email phishing campaigns. They can be very convincing if you're not paying close attention. The compromised accounts had privileged access that the attackers used to send out those tweets.

As fun a rollercoaster as it was to ride in real time, I keep returning to one sobering thought: we're lucky those responsible only seemed to be interested in money. The tweets generated over $100,000 worth of bitcoin transfers. That's not a small amount of money, but I also expect access to the Twitter accounts that can use the tools and systems used to tweet from the affected accounts would be worth more than that. How much is a tweet from Elon Musk's account worth a week away from Tesla's Q2 earnings? We've seen the stock market ripples Musk's tweets send.

We'll learn more about exactly what happened soon, but I expect the nature of the hack is why a shorter term payoff was used. Perhaps the way they got into the system was loud and so they knew their access was limited. Perhaps something more sinister has already happened and this was just a distraction. Whatever's going on, this exercise has been a strong reminder of how much power, prominence, and influence Twitter has in general. It's also been a general reminder of just how jam packed with crazy 2020 has been.