The Big Twitter Hack From Last Week Was Done By Teens In Basements, Y’all. And That Should Freak EVERYONE Out.

According to this, that big hack that occurred earlier this week when massively high profile accounts (Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and several others) were hacked and then put out bitcoin scam messages – was all the fault of a coupla gamers alongside an alleged Twitter insider.

The good news is that the gamers aren’t linked to any state or organized criminal group. The bad news is that they just proved that Twitter is INCREDIBLY susceptible to hacks from state or organized criminal groups.

An analyst from a cybersecurity firm explained how bad this could have been. “An incident such as this could have extraordinary serious consequences – manipulation of the markets, disinformation relating to an election, etc. However, in this case, reporting suggests that the hack was carried out by a group of young people who may have done nothing worse than execute a bitcoin scam. Twitter got lucky.”

Yeah. That’s seriously lucky – and not just for Twitter, but for the WORLD.

Jack Dorsey’s gonna have some serious explaining to do.

From the source:

The attack unfolded when a mysterious ringleader, known by the username ‘Kirk’, first approached other participants online late on Tuesday, claiming that he worked at Twitter and showing off his ability to hijack accounts, according to Times interviews with four people connected with the scheme.

‘Kirk’ offered to hijack coveted ‘OG accounts’ and proposed that the group could sell them. OG, short for ‘original gangster’, accounts consist of a username with single character or short word, such as @6, @b, or @dead, which would have been created early in Twitter’s history. Such accounts are highly coveted by hackers and gamers.

‘Kirk’ convinced two other young people, who go by the monikers ‘lol’ and ‘ever so anxious’ to act as brokers for the sale of OG names, and the two posted an ad on the forum OGusers.com, where they are well known, according to the Times.

The user ‘lol’ did not confirm his real-world identity to the Times, but said he lived on the West Coast and was in his 20s. ‘Ever so anxious’ said he was 19 and lived in the south of England with his mother.

After ‘Kirk’ proved that he had the ability to take over any Twitter account, the group began hijacking and selling coveted OG usernames, including @anxious, which ‘ever so anxious’ had long desired.

After their initial scheme saw modest success, bringing in thousands of dollars, ‘lol’ and ‘ever so anxious’ claimed to the Times that ‘Kirk’ went rogue, hijacking high-profile accounts and posting requests to send bitcoin to the wallet address that ‘Kirk’ had also used to receive payment for the OG names.

The fraudulent posts, which were largely deleted quickly, said people had 30 minutes to send $1,000 in bitcoin, promising they would receive twice as much in return.

More than $100,000 worth of bitcoin was sent to email addresses mentioned in the tweets, according to Blockchain.com, which monitors crypto transactions.

Though ‘Kirk’ originally claimed to work for Twitter, ‘lol’ came to doubt the claim after seeing the damage he was willing to inflict on the company.

One hacker interviewed by the Times said he had heard rumors that ‘Kirk’ gained access to an internal Twitter Slack channel where he saw user credentials posted.

Twitter’s official account said, “Based on what we know right now, we believe approximately 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident. For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.’

Ummm…OK…that inspires exactly zero percent confidence that Twitter is in any way secure.

Unless there are serious charges against the perpetrators of this hack, particularly those who work FOR Twitter, this kinda stuff is going to continue, and as the analyst from the cybersecurity firm made clear, the consequences for that could be absolutely disastrous.

This was waaaaay too easy. If some 19 year old in a basement somewhere can wreak this kind of havoc, I feel like we’re totally doomed.