Social Hacking! It Never Fails! Just Ask Twitter!

It does not matter if you are running an online casino website like Sloto Cash online casino (with lots of money exchanges), or a small boutique store that sells candles or even one of the largest social media websites like Twitter. What all of these sites have in common is that they can be targeted for social hacking. Even large sites like Twitter, with huge budgets dedicated to security, are not protected.

The now famous Twitter hack happened on July 15, 2020. 130 Twitter accounts were hacked. For 45 of those accounts, the hackers were able to reset the passwords. For some of the accounts, the goal was to just resell the account access. This includes single letter accounts and symbol accounts like "@", "@a", "@b", "@c", etc. That part people can understand. People will always be greedy.

But what is disturbing is the list of high profile accounts that were hacked, the order, and when finally Twitter reacted:

• Elon Musk (1:17 pm July 15)
• God (2:37 pm, July 15)
• CashApp (4:22 pm, July 15)
• Bill Gates (Microsoft founder) (4:34 pm July 15)
• Uber (corporate account) (4:55 pm, July 15)
• Kanye West (short lived US Presidential Candidate and currently running a write-in campaign) (5:03 pm, July 15)
• Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) (5:07 pm July 15)
• Mike Bloomberg (5:13 pm July 15)
• Joe Biden (Democrat US Presidential candidate) (Screenshot dated 5:22 pm July 15)
• Warren Buffet (investor) (5:27 pm, July 15)
• Elon Musk (Tesla) (5:27 pm, July 15)
• Wiz Khalifa (5:30 pm, July 15)
• Barack Obama (former US President) (5:35 pm July 15) -- Biden says that he was quick to respond, but the scam was not shut down until 24 hours later.
• Mr. Beast (5:39 pm, July 15)
• Floyd Mayweather (5:45 pm, July 15)
• Kim Kardashian (6:05 pm, July 15)
• xxxtentacion (10:49 pm, July 15)
• US Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) (screenshot dated 12:28 am July 16)
• July 16, 5:38 am Twitter Support locks the accounts. It took Twitter 24 hours to lock down the system? WTF?
• 8:41 pm, Twitter says things should be back to normal, "Hours after the initial attack" -- yea, hours, just 21 hours after AOC's warning.

According to one article, "Biden's campaign quickly responded to its account being hacked. Twitter locked down the account immediately following the breach and removed the related tweet" But the account was hacked at 5:22pm and the accounts were not shut down until 5:38 am the next morning. 12 hours for a response to a cyber attack against a Presidential candidate? Talk about a slow response by Twitter, if Biden actually did report the issue at 5:35 pm the previous day.

When Twitter finally did shut down the account, the users were not able to post for 2 hours while the accounts were being repaired.

What happened?

This is what happened.

It was a coordinated social engineering attack. The hackers targeted some employees with access to internal systems and tools. In simple terms, somebody got the contact information for some Twitter employees and bribed them with a lot of money to hack into these accounts.

It was a bitcoin scam. "I am giving back to the community. All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled! If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000. Only doing this for 30 minutes," the message read on the hacked accounts.

Are people really that stupid? Let's put on our thinking caps. Why would Barack Obama (who is trying to raise money for the Biden campaign) or Presidential Candidate Joe Biden (who is actually running for President) give money away in Bitcoins?

Anybody who ask for payment in Bitcoins or Gift cards or iTune cards or something similar is screaming SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM. This is not to say that all people who conduct business in bitcoins are scam artists, but this is an obvious scam.

But is this the whole story? What made Twitter finally shut down the accounts?

Although this post on the surface seems benign, it is very disturbing. A Presidential candidate's account is hacked, and it takes secret service 24 hours to respond?

The last account that I could find being attacked that had a timestamp was AOC's account at 12:28 am, but that only gives the timestamp of her messaging people to ignore the tweet. It does not give the time of the actual posting. That information I was not able to find. But even given that time, it is still 5 hours from when AOC noticed the problem until Twitter shut down the accounts.

Looking at the list and the fact that for 24 hours after Biden's account was hacked, Twitter was still not shutting down the scam, it makes me wonder, "Why wasn't Trump's account hacked?" Obviously the Secret Service was not paying attention, and neither was Twitter, and neither was the DNC.

I wonder, in the back of my head, if Trump's account was also hacked, but since Twitter watches Trump's account like a hawk searching for its next prey (and Trump is watching his account to see if his account gets dinged by Twitter), the hacking was caught immediately. All eyes are on Trump . . . everything he says, everything he does, everything he thinks, is subject to scrutiny. That is the only thing that makes sense, because nothing else makes sense.

What can we take away from this?

Social hacking works. It always has, and it always will, because people, in general, are stupid and greedy. They want something for nothing.

Imagine this. You are working in the post office, and somebody contacts you and says to you, "For each mail-in ballot that you get on your route that is for a dead person or somebody who has moved, I will pay you $5." I just listened to Trump's Press Secretary where she was saying that in Nevada, for just one postal worker in one week, the postal worker had 65 such ballots. The next week it was over a hundred of such ballots. Now times that by every single postal worker in the US. That a lot of unaccounted for ballots.

It is so easy. It is so simple. It is so hard to catch. And it can easily change the outcome of an election, especially when you add in people want to do ballot harvesting on top of that.

Each side knows who has not voted in X previous elections. It would be so easy to pay somebody to just go to those apartments/houses and just take the ballots out of the mailboxes. Do you think that somebody who has not voted in the last several elections is going to notice that their ballot did not show up and report it?

Summary, Social Hacking Works!

Postal workers can be just as easily bribed as Twitter employees. Mail-in ballots are not safe and never will be safe, because the chain of "evidence" is broken. Anybody who claims that mail-in ballot voting is safe is ignoring human nature. Pay somebody enough money (or a whole group of somebodies), and somebody will do anything, no matter what the risk is. When our society has gotten to the level of whacking police officers with sticks that have nails sticking out of them is viewed as acceptable and normal behavior, bribing a postal worker to "steal" ballots would not be out of the realm of possibilities.