Tag: twitter

The Tool That Took Over Twitter

If you were staring at your Twitter feed last week, you probably saw a bunch of famous people and brands post a Bitcoin wallet address, asking people to send in money. 

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Apple, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Uber, Wiz Khalifa, Floyd Mayweather, were all among 130 accounts that hackers took control of in a brazen hack. 

Joseph Cox was the first to report that the hackers had pulled off the hack leveraging an internal Twitter tool used by company employees. The New York Times later confirmed the story, talking directly to some of the hackers involved. 

On this week’s CYBER, we spoke to Joseph, who broke down how the hack actually happened, and what we can all learn from it.

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China, QAnon Censorship, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

QAnon is one of the most annoying things on Twitter and its followers are morons. And, also, it is dangerous and unacceptable that monopolistic Silicon Valley tech plutocrats are exerting more and more control over human communication.

I criticize QAnon constantly and find its acolytes intensely irritating. And, also, I don’t want monopolistic tech billionaires paternalistically protecting my fragile little mind from them.

Twitter shouldn’t be censoring this.

In a corporatist system of government, where few meaningful distinctions exist between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Permitting such a thing, to any extent, is extremely hazardous for the future of human development.

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Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown

Twitter announced on Tuesday it has begun taking sweeping actions to limit the reach of QAnon content and banned many of the conspiracy theory’s followers due to ongoing problems with harassment and the dissemination of misinformation.

Twitter will stop recommending accounts and content related to QAnon, including in email and follow recommendations and will take steps to limit content circulation in places like trends and search. This action will affect approximately 150,000 accounts, according to a spokesperson, who asked to remain unnamed due to concerns about the targeted harassment of social media employees.

The Twitter spokesperson also said the company had taken down more than 7,000 QAnon accounts in the last few weeks for breaking its rules on targeted harassment as part of its new policy.

The sweeping enforcement action will ban QAnon-related terms from appearing in trending topics and the platform’s search feature, ban known QAnon-related URLs, and ban “swarming” of victims who are baselessly targeted by coordinated harassment campaigns pushed by its followers.

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Top Biden communications aide has history of sexist Twitter posts

Joe Biden’s head of strategic communications, Kamau M. Marshall, has repeatedly posted sexist messages on social media over the past decade, beginning with a Christmas Eve 2011 tweet in which he expressed his affection for “power women” – as long as she “know[s] her place” and he can “where [sic] the pants.”

The social media posts are the latest example of a top Biden staffer undercutting the former vice president’s public messaging. On Friday, Fox News reported that a supervising videographer on the campaign, Sara Pearl, openly called for defunding the police and tweeted a meme mocking officers as worse than “pigs” – even as Biden says he only wants some money redirected from police departments.

Within minutes of this story’s publication, Marshall deleted many of the tweets cited in this article, but Fox News retained screenshots. The Biden team has declined to offer any comment on the posts by either Marshall and Pearl, and Marshall did not respond to an emailed request for comment prior to this story’s publication.

Unlike Pearl’s messages, Marshall’s posts are from a senior campaign official – and appear to be part of a long-running pattern.

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Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts

 A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts.

On Wednesday, a spike of high profile accounts including those of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Uber, and Apple tweeted cryptocurrency scams in an apparent hack.

“We used a rep that literally done all the work for us,” one of the sources told Motherboard. The second source added they paid the Twitter insider. Motherboard granted the sources anonymity to speak candidly about a security incident. A Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that the company is still investigating whether the employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to the tool.

The accounts were taken over using an internal tool at Twitter, according to the sources, as well as screenshots of the tool obtained by Motherboard. One of the screenshots shows the panel and the account of Binance; Binance is one of the accounts that hackers took over today. According to screenshots seen by Motherboard, at least some of the accounts appear to have been compromised by changing the email address associated with them using the tool.

In all, four sources close to or inside the underground hacking community provided Motherboard with screenshots of the user tool. Two sources said the Twitter panel was also used to change ownership of some so-called OG accounts—accounts that have a handle consisting of only one or two characters—as well as facilitating the tweeting of the cryptocurrency scams from the high profile accounts.

Twitter has been deleting some screenshots of the panel and has suspended users who have tweeted them, claiming that the tweets violate its rules.

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Twitter Blocks Tweets On China Human Rights Abuses Story As AG Barr Decries Silicon Valley ‘Collaboration’ With CCP

As the Trump Administration weighs a travel ban on CCP officials, AG Bill Barr delivered a speech warning about the complicity of Silicon Valley and Hollywood in helping to perpetuate the CCP’s growing influence over American culture.

Criticizing China for resisting political liberalization that Americans once believed would eventually follow along with the economic liberalization agenda, Beijing is now embarking on a mission to elevate itself as a locus of geopolitical power to rival the US.

Barr complained that Hollywood has become too willing to kowtow to Beijing, censoring not just versions of movies that are shown in China, but also those that are released in the US.

Many Hollywood films have been “altered one way or another to please the CCP” and many other scripts never see the light of day due to self-censorship. Barr added that it’s tantamount to a “massive propaganda coup”.

He also invoked the memory of Walt Disney, saying the found would be “ashamed” of what happened to his company.

I suspect Walt Disney would be disheartened to see how the company he founded deals with the foreign dictatorships of our day,” Barr said in a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.

As an example, Barr cited “World War Z”, which reportedly contained a scene where the protagonists speculated that the virus originated in China. Examples of this type of censorship have grown increasingly common Barr said.

He also accused the American tech behemoths from Google to Facebook and Twitter of doing the CCP’s bidding.

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