About the Game: This dead hacker s account could be the key to the big Twitter hack | Mashable The former account of Adrian Lamo, the deceased hacker who helped convict Chelsea Manning, could be the key to how Twitter',s verified user hack went down. His account might hold the secret to the massive Twitter hack. He died two years ago. It’s been more than 48 hours since Twitter was targeted in the largest hack of the company’s 14-year history. Yet, little is still known about how a hacker or group of hackers gained access to the accounts of former President Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Kanye West, among others — some of the platform’s biggest verified users — in order to tweet out a Bitcoin scam. But, one Twitter user involved in the infosec community has a very good idea about how at least one major part of the hack went down. So let's break it down. Lucky225, a deceased hacker, and the Chelsea Manning connection. A security researcher who goes by the Twitter username Lucky225 penned a very interesting Medium post on Thursday detailing his own unique experience with the big Twitter hack. Upon hearing about the attack on Wednesday, Lucky225 immediately checked on the status of one of the accounts he runs which has a rare Twitter handle, @6. These handles are often called an OG username" due to the fact that they're so short or generic that they had to have been registered during the early days of the platform. Lucky225 administers the @6 Twitter account which once belonged to Adrian Lamo, who passed away in 2018. If Lamo’s name sounds familiar to you, it’s because you’ve almost certainly heard of him before. Lamo was a big name in hacker circles in the early 2000s. But, in 2010, Lamo made news: He'd been informing U.S. authorities on Chelsea Manning's role in providing Wikileaks with leaked classified information. This resulted in Manning’s arrest. Upon looking into it, Lucky225 found that he had, indeed, been logged out of the @6 Twitter account, which Lamo's family granted him permission to run. It turns out, a few hours before verified Twitter accounts belonging to Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos started tweeting about the same Bitcoin scam, Lucky225 received an email. The email wasn’t from Twitter, it was from Google Voice, informing him that a text message was sent concerning a password reset for Lamo’s @6 account. Lucky225 had not requested this reset. What Twitter is telling us right now. As the hack was occurring on Wednesday, screenshots of what allegedly depicted Twitter’s internal admin panel, a sort of "master tool" the company uses to monitor and moderate user accounts, were being shared on the platform. It’s still unconfirmed if these were indeed authentic screencaps of the platform’s backend. However, the belief is that with so many big users’ accounts being accessed at once, the hacker(s) almost assuredly didn’t use the usual methods of targeting each user via a phishing email or other classic social engineering methods. Whether the hackers had a contact on the inside of the company or an employee with admin access was socially engineered themselves is still unknown. Here’s what we do know: In order to stop the attack and barrage of Bitcoin scam tweets coming from verified users' accounts, the company locked down all verified accounts for a short period of time. (Even accounts that had attempted to change their password during the attack were locked out, with many still having issues getting back online.) Twitter has since confirmed that around 130 verified users were affected by the attack. The company is also now saying that it doesn’t believe it's necessary for users to change their account password as the hackers did not have access to account credentials. The investigation, however, is still ongoing. And Twitter isn’t saying much more than that quite yet. How the hackers accessed those verified accounts. A new report published on Friday evening from big time gangsta hack
