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San Francisco, United States:
Hackers concerned within the high-profile hijacking of Twitter accounts earlier this week had been younger buddies with no hyperlinks to state or organized crime, The New York Times reported Friday.
The attack, which Twitter and federal police are investigating, began with a playful message between hackers on the platform Discord, a chat service common with players, in keeping with the Times.
The paper stated it had interviewed 4 individuals who participated within the hacking, who shared logs and screenshots backing up their accounts of what occurred.
“The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers,” the Times reported.
“Instead, it was done by a group of young people – one of whom says he lives at home with his mother – who got to know one another because of their obsession with owning early or unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like @y or @6.”
The large hack of high-profile customers from Elon Musk to Joe Biden has raised questions on Twitter’s safety because it serves as a megaphone for politicians forward of November’s election.
“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,” Twitter stated in a tweet.
“For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.”
Posts making an attempt to dupe individuals into sending hackers the digital foreign money bitcoin had been tweeted by the official accounts of Apple, Uber, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Barack Obama and plenty of others on Wednesday.
Twitter stated it seemed to be a “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”
‘Original Gangster’ accounts
Fraudulent posts, which had been largely deleted, stated individuals had 30 minutes to ship $1,000 in cryptocurrency bitcoin, promising they might obtain twice as a lot in return.
More than $100,000 value of bitcoin was despatched to e mail addresses talked about within the tweets, in keeping with Blockchain.com, which displays crypto transactions.
The younger hackers interviewed by the Times stated a mysterious person who glided by the title “Kirk” initiated the scheme with a message and was the one with entry to Twitter accounts.
They contended they had been solely concerned in commandeering lesser-known Twitter accounts, significantly to swipe coveted brief handles corresponding to an “@” signal and single letters or numbers that might simply be offered, in keeping with the report.
The younger hackers maintained they stopped serving as middlemen for “Kirk” when high-profile accounts grew to become targets.
Some hackers are “obsessed” with hijacking “Original Gangster” social media accounts staked out within the providers’ early days which have brief profile names, in keeping with Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security.
“Possession of these OG accounts confers a measure of status and perceived influence and wealth in SIM swapping circles, as such accounts can often fetch thousands of dollars when resold in the underground,” Krebs stated in a submit.
Hackers concerned within the assault on Twitter marketed account names at an OGusers.com web site, asking for fee in bitcoin, in keeping with the Times report.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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