I think people are still severely under-estimating how dangerous this was.
Back in 2013 when The Associated Press was hacked with a tweet of "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured" and erased $136 billion in equity market value:
It's almost as if web services that let people post whatever they want at any time, vulnerable to whatever security flaws may be present, shouldn't be used as a reliable source for up-to-the-minute information about literally anything important at all.
Apparently the "fallout" was an exaggeration that Orson went along with because it gave him more publicity. From the Wikipedia:
>"The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. ... Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted."
and
"Welles later embraced the story as part of his personal myth. "Houses were emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there was wailing in the streets and the rending of garments," he told Peter Bogdanovich years later."
"CBS, too, found reports ultimately useful in promoting the strength of its influence. radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted."
I loved to ask my grandmother about this because she recalled listening to the original broadcast. She said the station would take commercial breaks to interrupt the story, and they reminded listeners it was a fictitious broadcast when taking these breaks. She didn't believe that anyone could be fooled by it, at least not to the extent that was reported.
According to family folk lore, during WWII when they had double summer time, my grandmother managed to put the clocks 2 hours forwards instead of 2 hours back. So woke up in the small hours and turned on radio to BBC and heard German (they transmitted to Germany as propaganda, and during night used channels normally broadcasting in English). Immediately wakes whole household - "we've been invaded - the Germans have taken over the BBC"!
This is true about how the events unfolded in the US, but the “War of the Worlds” story was translated and re-broadcast in Latin America where it had a much more devastating effect. In Ecuador, even the army and the police were rushed to the site where the invasion was supposedly taking place, intensifying the panic for average citizens. Never underestimate the potential power of a fictional story that is irresponsibly disclosed.
Fascinating - thanks for sharing. Newspapers always play the same dirty tricks - they're doing the same now with the tech reporting because they're losing ad revenue to the tech companies.
It's not feasible for every trusted source of knowledge to have their own radio station, so the sources utilize existing stations, and consumers have no choice but to tune into those stations.
It's perfectly feasible for every trusted source of knowledge to run a web server, and they actually do it, so it's sad that consumers don't connect directly to those servers and instead use middlemen.
I know we're not supposed to discuss downvotes, but there's a sibling comment that makes the point I wanted to make, but it's dead. It seems fine, and the user's history is filled with dead comments that mostly also seem fine.
Regardless, if anyone has a response to a bunch of websites being a worse security model than one giant platform, you can reply to me instead.
Also, if you look through their comment history, you can often find the comment(s) that got them shadow-banned. And if their ~recent comment history is good, with many vouched comments, you can ask dang to un-ban them.
> People are not looking for trusted sources of knowledge. They are looking for entertainment.
Which people? Whose people? This is not a statement of psychological truth. It may however describe a societal truth.
But it is not true that people in all countries want above all to be entertained. People struggle in undemocratic countries. Education makes democracy strong. It also breeds rebels.
Public discourse reflects education. A society conditions its citizens to think a certain way. The typical conditioning involves protecting the society. The flag, the anthem, the history, the current power structure and its wars.
It's sad to see journalism collapse in a democracy. It's sad and perhaps fatal for democracy if people have been conditioned to be infantile and their implanted desire for gratification has overwhelmed their thinking and speech.
What people trust is generally what fits their worldview which is increasingly reinforced by the filter bubbles provided by tech companies. The increasing polarisation and tribalism is made worse by the traditional network programming and now algorithms that present what the audience is comfortable to see and hear.
I like using DDG because it doesn't filter, but at the same time I hate wading through utter crap and being the filter.
Twitter for all its flaws is pretty good at giving everyone a voice so you can read something and then the criticisms without having to aggregate that from multiple sites.
How often do you need to be the filter? I’m genuinely curious because your experience is very different from my own, where I’ve been using DDG for years and I only notice poor results roughly 1 in 100 of the times, and then I’m just a quick “g! <search term>” away from slightly higher quality results.
Political news. G! does a better job of pushing smaller regional papers and more left/right leaning outlets and blogs down the rankings so the mainstream media gets more of a look in.
What prevents those trusted sources from being similarly hacked once they're now the main arbiters of important information? I'd even argue this may be more dangerous especially if tech and security are not their core focus.
I think radio is probably a better source than Twitter as a whole, however they did air (still air?) Coast to Coast AM for decades.
Though Art Bell said the show was "pure entertainment", anyone who tuned in without that context heard what sounded like a serious news talk program about aliens, crystal healing, reptilians, etc, etc.
There's a documentary I saw that explains that the hubbub around Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast was just to cover up the arrival of Red Lectroids.
Bingo. Information should always be confirmed with at least one other (hopefully) independent source. The more sources, the merrier. If there aren't independent sources then don't jump to conclusions.
That's partially because the sources formally seen as primary, at least in the US, have started to be viewed as biased and unreliable.
This is largely through their own actions. Examples are legion, but a recent one is debacle at NYT over an op-ed. The news-consuming public was able to view the shenanigans of NYT reporters and staffers, which would formerly been done being the scenes.
Many eyes were opened, and I'm certain I wasn't the only one thinking "These are the people in supposed to be trusting for my news and analysis?"
>That's partially because the sources formally seen as primary...
Newspapers and news outlets aren't actually "primary source". If you read a quoted tweet from Obama in the New York Times, the NYT isn't the "primary source" - Obama is. The NYT is a secondary source that is quoting from primary source.
In that sense, Twitter is actually primary source, because Obama wrote the tweet. Well, except when Twitter is hacked, which is what makes this such a significant event.
(But I agree with your general comment, especially having been interviewed a few times and seen how most reporters work. There are a handful of good ones out there though.)
Or it could be the result of a decades long effort to attack credible authoritative institutions by forces that take a dim view of transparency and accountability.
Possible explanation. But I think it is more like someone took advantage of the situation after the news have been undermining their own credibility for decades.
It's also because these "credible" mainstream media sources started reporting non-credible information as factual. Much of this inaccurate information originates from Twitter.
If 200 people on Twitter are angry at politician X over something trivial, we are served a news headline of Person X accused of Y - Public calls for resignation.
An anonymous person on social media recently made a claim of sexual assault against Justin Bieber with no evidence whatsoever, and the media reports it as Justin Bieber accused of sexual assault. He was fortunate to immediately whip out numerous receipts countering the claims, but what if he couldn't? We would still be reading headlines about this baseless accusation.
I agree. I have been following the rule of not trusting any such significant news for 48 hours and sometimes even a week because often, news gets debunked or more info comes out.
But is that really new? Other than scale and reach (quantitative difference), how is that any different qualitatively from the old grapevine/gossip network? "My dad's co-worker's, girlfriend's uncle works at ... and said..."
That didn't get disseminated and diffused to tens of millions. If something was published they'd look for official sources or corroborating sources and or secondary evidence. If AP, EFE, UPI, Kyodo, Interfax etc all get their news from one source [Twitter] that's just laziness.
“ A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” has been a cliche for a hundred years. I don’t think internet social networks are a difference in kind, but they probably are a difference in degree.
Agreed but I said "apart from scale and reach". The point I was trying to make was that people have always found it fairly easy to believe non-credible sources. In this sense, social media is not qualitatively different. Only quantitatively different.
A large quantitative change is indistinguishable from a qualitative change: what's the difference between light rain and a flood, between some small waves and a tsunami?
What I meant, is that in the eyes/ears of those RECEIVING the information (and believing it uncritically), there's no difference. People have always had a predisposition to uncritically accepting information from those "in the tribe", whether that be extended family, or an internet echo chamber. Presumably this was a survival optimisation. Trust those "close", and distrust "others".
What you're saying makes some sense - a television broadcast, say, requires effort from a lot of people to produce - and, previously, expensive special equipment to broadcast, though now TV content is often streamed over the web - so it has a level of credibility, the TV news at least can't be spoofed by one person in their bedroom on the other side of the world. (Note that deepfakes may be changing this).
But the world we live in is full of "web services that let people post whatever they want at any time". News from Twitter may be weird but many people want to get their news from the BBC website, or the New York Times, or Reuters or whatever. Or their own government's websites. Just web services that people post from - presumably with levels of editing and checking but all presumably with security flaws that could bypass them.
It's not clear exactly what you're asking for. A technological solution involving careful checking of cryptographic signatures? Or some sort of super-expensive-to-spoof source of all important news?
This is unfair. You are talking about a nation of 330 million people.
But it is fair to say that there is no sane channel of information. The channels of public discourse in the US, once controlled by a few "loyal, patriotic" corporate owners fed by advertising revenue, are now channels controlled by unprincipled corporatism that supports a two-party system of untalented puppets.
While I am 10000% onboard with decentralizing communication, I am not sure if that would help in cases like this though. Back in 2013, only a single news outlet AP's twitter was hacked and had similar consequences. Decentralizing wouldn't have helped there I think.
Then you need to make sure people cannot under any circumstances be sloppy with securing private keys, since once they can, some important people will, and then such things happen again, any maybe they'll have actual consequences, people die, markets collapse, economies collapse, wars break out ...
And then? Doing damage control on a fake post by the CEO of Supercorp saying they're faltering financially, or whatever, when it has that green badge of crypto-authenticity, and you've spun your marketing in such a way to tell people "if that's there, it is 100% authentic, just look for that badge" ... that would be a nightmare. It's an issue with "verified" already, but cryptography is essentially magic; many in tech believe they get the nuances but don't really, and most outside of tech don't even begin to get the nuances. Would that damage people's trust in cryptography in general? Maybe?
After all, most people don't know, understand and/or care that their Whatsapp E2E is effectively broken for police and similar actors when they enable backups, because most people care about the details of these things about as much as I care about the exact things my hairdresser does to make my hair look good, which is pretty much not at all unless they want to use a chainsaw or something. If that were to be abused in a major way, that'd probably make big headlines.
I don't think that, at this point, cryptography is even generally helpful with fundamentally social problems like these, because it tends to be incredibly hard to build a product and UX around it that works for everyone and fails in a way that is somewhat understandable and actionable – the amount of work that HTTPS has required and still requires to mostly get there has been and still is huge.
It shouldn't be, but the bleeding edge of markets have always relied on having the latest data from anywhere that can indicate a shift and I don't expect it to change anytime soon.
Exactly. Twitter only succeeds because it's an authoritative source for who a tweet is from. It'll surely be questioned in the future since this is huge, but any other platform getting hacked like YouTube or Facebook would have similar consequences.
Nay, Sir, our brave corporations that regularly sell themselves out to low-cost labour markets will surely defend democracy here and around the world when we call upon them!
Remedy is painfully obvious: make an example of Twitter and pass laws that holds platform operators liable. That should fix all sorts of security problems.
Company X presents the public with communications of known public figure. Company X assures the public, via a blue checkmark, that said communications are from a "verified" account.
Shouldn't company X be liable if someone other than the known figure is making public statements?
It seems logical, fair, and a societal 'good thing', that company X should either let go of the pretense of "verified" communications, or get its act together, or pay the legal price.
So true. it's a toilet. A few months back I told myself no more, I resigned my account and haven't missed it at all. massive time sink, and utterly pointless. It isn't a conversation, it's yelling at a brick wall, then yelling louder when you don't get an answer.
Because the conversation was about Americans taking Twitter too seriously, not Twitter's discourse being dominated by Americans. The relevant metric seems to be the percentage of each population using twitter.
Financial markets do. Where acting faster than your competition is essential you don't have a lot of choice.
As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets (nobody is going to go to war over a tweet without fact checking it) but access to private messages is an entirely different story.
Bismarck released his carefully worded readout in the evening of Thursday, 14 July 1870. Assuming the french were "making the bridge" for Bastille Day, they would have had one working day (Monday, 18 July 1870) to fact check, but I don't know if they took even that, because according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Franco-Prussian_... , on 19 July 1870 "Le Sourd, the French Chargé d'Affaires, delivered Napoleon [III]'s declaration of war at the Foreign Office" in Berlin.
https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11... suggests the french were already mobilising on 14 July itself, and that while telegraph use may technically have been possible, US diplomats were still communicating by snail mail with State.
That emotion won over fact checking is supported by Ch. I p.3
> Washburne dismissed the accuracy of the Ems telegram because it had been challenged by King Wilhelm. "There is no truth in the reports concerning the indignity which the King of the North German Confederation offered to Benedetti, the Envoy of France." Washburne based this statement on a published denial by the King which he had read in Cologne while returning to Paris. Though he questioned the veracity of the Ems telegram, Washburne still credited it with arousing the French Chamber of Deputies to vote for war.
(the war vote was Friday, 15 July. It might be interesting to see if any french papers had carried Wilhelm's version of events.)
> As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets
Depends how tense the situation already was. A well-timed tweet could be enough to tip things over the edge if both sides were already on the edge, and I don't think we're too far away from that.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of journalists/new people, are active on Twitter. I would expect them to be over represented given the amount of reports based or citing tweets, but I don’t know.
Frankly the biggest problem with twitter is journalists taking it seriously and abjuring their actual jobs of explaining what's going on in the world in favor of low effort no-information bullshit like "person X said Y on twitter." Literally nobody else with a life and a day job does. It's the comments section they removed from their websites.
The "muh stock market" argument is stupid; there are punters who take it seriously, and obviously, it's a great vola signal for automated traders. So what? Rumors were propagated before twitter and will be propagated long after it goes the way of other useless companies like pets dot com.
People keep saying it could have started a war. Excuse me for being naive but come on—really? This is total sensationalism. What party wouldn’t verify something on twitter through diplomatic channels before going to war?
Wars start from smaller conflicts, which come about through escalation of smaller conflicts, lies, or misunderstandings. I think all that is necessary to start a war is a geopolitical event of sufficient severity to provoke a retaliation; once the first retaliation happens, there is high risk of further escalation.
So the question is whether a deception on Twitter could trigger a real-world event significant enough to provoke a retaliation. It might be hard to do that with a single message, but they had access to multiple accounts. These tweets were stupidly obvious scams. You could create a huge amount of panic with a series of posts from different influential accounts if they were designed to be believable.
Exactly! Nothing major could have come out of this.
If you disagree, please let me try to convince you;
Tweets were about bitcoin, therefore broad public was not the target of the attack.
Hence Twitter just prevented verified accounts from posting and deleted some messages. Had president's account been hijacked and threats of imminent nuclear strike etc. were thrown around, DoD would have been quick to contact to Twitter and they would have been disabled the whole account, put notifications about hijack for everyone to see (like these COVID notifications) or maybe even take the whole platform offline until they fix it.
You would click a link to go to the said tweet, but you'd only see president's account is not there, and there's a huge warning saying it has been hijacked, and devs are working to get it back. That's it.
Now please try to convince me otherwise, I'd love to be challenged on this.
> Tweets were about bitcoin, therefore broad public was not the target of the attack.
No. Bitcoin was used because it's the only way to get money without being tracked (hence why drug dealers and even hitmen use it).
The rest of your argument is all speculation. Nobody knows what would've happened, so you can't convince anyone you're right, just like no one can convince you you're wrong.
I will just say that with the current distrust of Russia/China and in recent years, the US becoming an "unreliable" ally for Europe, a few tweets from a President and perhaps some other senior members of Government could easily have started a disastrous series of events (if unlikely to cause war directly).
> and they would have been disabled the whole account, put notifications about hijack for everyone to see (like these COVID notifications) or maybe even take the whole platform offline until they fix it.
This hack had been going on for over two hours, with new high-stakes accounts being steadily taken over (and possibly have their DMs siphoned) and their only action was to disable posting for verified accounts. I think we can safely say that IF Twitter had the possibility to effectively pull the plug, we would've seen that on Wednesday.
This hack simply proved that a lot bigger things are possible. They could have (maybe they did) read private messages which could simply be used for blackmail. A top defense official getting blackmailed is pretty easy step to escalation to broken diplomacy.
A top defence official or the president private messaging someone could contain information able to break diplomatic relations. Obtaining information required to blackmail one could trigger a minor incident which escalates.
Get Trump's account, and tweet something like, "I've ordered a NUCLEAR STRIKE on China! The missiles are already in the air. The DEEP STATE is trying to take me out. They will try to silence me and delete these tweets and use deep fakes to say this was a hoax! The storm is here, Q is real, it's time to take up arms and kill democrats."
Then continue tweeting escalating things over the next half hour (since apparently the hackers couldn't be stopped for a while).
Not to mention hijacking other accounts that would plausibly say things along the same lines as "proof" that the statement is real.
Even after dozens of high profile accounts were hacked many were still commenting that they didn't think it was possible for it to be a twitter vulnerability, but rather individual accounts being compromised or a 3rd party. If you only tweeted plausible things about war and corroborated it from multiple accounts at the same time you can reinforce things pretty easily.
Considering that they got Obama's account as well, you could very well create a narrative and counter narrative using the POTUS and ex-POTUS accounts. For the sake of fiction, you could have Obama tweet that he is, indeed, taking over, and arresting Trump. Maybe not war, but it could exacerbate the lack of trust across political divides.
What could be dangerous about it is that CNNFOX et al would copy-paste the story without fact checking, inflate it, and make as much money from it as they can.
In SF author Neal Stephenson's latest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell there is a hoax to convince people that Moab, Utah has been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. A cyberattack takes the city's communications offline, paid actors describe seeing the flash and mushroom cloud from passenger planes, etc.
Twenty years later, a substantial part of American society is still insisting Moab really was nuked, drives around with "Remember Moab" bumper stickers, and considers the purported continued existence of Moab to be something like a Deep State plot.
>By August 14, the recording of Reagan's joke had become world news. On August 15, someone who the National Security Agency described to US Representative Michael D. Barnes as "a wayward operator in the Soviet Far Eastern command" sent a coded message from Vladivostok that said, in part, "We now embark on military action against the U.S. forces." Japanese and US intelligence decoded the message and raised the alert state in that part of the world; Soviet naval vessels in the North Pacific, on the other hand, contacted Vladivostok in confusion. The US never saw any evidence of Soviet attack preparations, and the alert status as promulgated by Vladivostok was canceled within 30 minutes.[3]
>Initially, on August 13, the deputy minister of Soviet foreign affairs (Valentin Kamenev) told reporters, "I have nothing to say."[5] By the next day, though, President Reagan's leaked comments were denounced by the Soviet government, Pravda, Izvestia, and TASS as "unprecedentedly hostile," as evidence of the United States' insincerity at trying to improve Soviet Union–United States relations, and as abuse of the office of the president. "Western diplomats" described the Soviet response as over-the-top, suggesting it was an effort to give themselves more collateral at the negotiating table with the US.[7] US officials were compelled to mollify the Soviet Union and assure the United States' Cold War adversary that "Reagan’s offhand remark did not reflect White House policies or U.S. military intentions."[8]
As dumb as Reagan was it was so out of character for him to say that that people clued in to it being a joke. In Trump's case it is not so far out that it might be believed.
Conspiracy nuts don't need much to set them off, see 'pizzagate'.
And then you need to people to read that nonsense. You need a Twitter account to be able to read that.
Only few people have Twitter accounts, it's a walled garden. Almost nobody cares what people shout in 140 chars, and likewise nobody cares about people streaming video on Twitch or YouTube in 20 min, what could be written publicly and read in 10 seconds.
Well let’s see...since all countries with ICBMs also have technology in place to detect or verify via satellite a nuclear launch, absolutely nothing would happen. If a real launch had taken place, they would have known about it far before they heard about a post on Twitter. The alarmism here on HN is really disappointing. This is the kind of foolishness usually reserved for Reddit.
The intended audience of such tweets wouldn’t be Russia or China, it would be the conspiracy-minded wingnuts who might take that as their sign. Who knows what they might try. At the very least it would fuel further social division.
With tensions already high and military maneuvers are beeing held closes to each other ... such a twitter comment for sure would have had an effect.
No one would have pushed any red button because of that, but fighter jets on both sides would have been put on alarm and in the air and close to each other(as well as submarines, warships, tanks on the border..) , with a high chance of clashes. Which could have increased the escalation to the point, that someone would feel forced to put the red button.
I think brainstorming about combinations of variables that could plausibly lead to a black swan event is worthwhile, and an excellent application for the collective mental processing powers of HN. I would advocate for a new kind of discussion class for threads, to focus on discrete perspectives and goals, risk being one of the most important kinds. Smart casual conversation is excellent, but there are other types that are also excellent, but in a different way.
I think plenty could have happened. Compare with the false nuclear attack alarm in Hawaii the other year. Panic can cause all kinds of unforseeable consequences.
Right, but I think the point is that panic is the only real danger this hack could've caused. That's important in it's own right, but hacking twitter is not going to cause nuclear war. DoD has a ... tentative relationship with social media. They are not making strategic deployment decisions based off of tweets (thank God).
> since all countries with ICBMs also have technology in place to detect or verify via satellite a nuclear launch
It's lucky that those kinds of things never go wron...
"On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early-warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from bases in the United States."
Indeed! Where do people think USD 2tn/year for global military go? Weapons, yes, but also military intelligence, missile detecting and defense systems, radars, sonars, spy satellites, communication efficiency and disaster prevention.
Military is not _exactly_ ran-out-of-diazepam Dave with his hunting rifle and tinfoil hat.
Nothing would happend from this. China and other might raise their alarm, but nobody would raise their own weapons without proof for something really happning outside of twitter.
In the meanwhile Trump would appear after some minutes on TV, youtube, and whatever other channel they have around, proofing that he is not sending the tweets, while twitter would do their stuff.
You are an optimist. We only need one mistake for things to get out of control. The history of known close calls is eye opening[1]. Similarly with this particular China example, it only takes one person to make a miscalculation.
I'm a realist. This list proofes that people are not as stupid as alarmists make them. At the end of the line, there are always people asking the relevant questions, because it's their f*ing job to do that.
War is perhaps an exaggeration, but if its wrong its wrong quantitatively, not qualitatively. In other words, lives unquestionably hung in the balance.
I dont even have a twitter, facebook, instagram, or... anything i think. just you people : )
“Unquestionably” you’ve got to at least give an example. How did lives hang in the balance? I’m not saying the likelihood is 0, it’s best not to be irresponsible like this obviously, but come on, it’s not even 0.5.
i will not. affected persons included biden, kanye, obama, musk, bezos, gates and others. this is an audience in the 100's of millions (if not over a billion, i didnt count). do you honestly think theres no possible tweet that directly leads to someone's death, and likely many deaths?
im not sure an outright war is > 50% possible, but i am sure it is > 0.0%
A war from hacked Tweets? What would these tweets say? “Premier Xi’s wife is ugly?” I mean Trump already tweets totally insane things regularly. “Rocket man” etc. what could joe Biden, bill gates or anyone possibly say on Twitter to start a war or even lead to some such mass death incident. Even “irresponsible” state actors like Iran would use intelligence channels to confirm things. Even the taliban doesn’t actually act irrationally. Maybe we need to agree to disagree here?
This is ridiculous, there is ample room for criticism against Trump. This wouldn't fit at all. I guess you can blame him on Turkeys reaction in Syria, his staunch anti-Iranian policies that made talks more difficult. But the criticism of him starting random wars comes from an emotional corner beyond reality in my opinion.
He's just seen (at least by the ROTW) as very unstable and prone to lashing out. He might not order a war but his inability to govern with rationality and diplomacy does give credence to the side effect of relations worsening to the point of armed conflict.
It's ironic that our kids in the future reading wikipedia there will be a table of numbers killed overseas by US presidents. Trump will be listed as one of the most peaceful in that table.
It's ironic because his image today is of violence and instability and that the opponents of him don't consider violence overseas or international peace as that important.
It's things happening at home which counts politically in a present time.
Trump will kill less than Obama but Obama gets the noble peace prize.
I looked it up and from what I could tell, drone strkes are actually up under Trump. I thought they were down, but looks like they just not being reported as much.
A president can’t just “start a war”, muchless order air strikes. dozens of people are involved. Donald Trump yells and hollers all the time and people send Jared to calm him down. There have already been documented instances of this in the Trump admin, and it wasn’t over tweets.
Whether the military would actually carry out those orders when no one else has ICBMs in the air is debatable, but the president's defined role as the commander-in-chief and the sole arbiter of when to open the gates of hell on earth is not.
> Whether the military would actually carry out those orders when no one else has ICBMs in the air is debatable
It's not merely debatable, it's highly debatable. People aren't just going to launch nuclear weapons willy nilly, no matter who the president is, muchless for Donald J. Trump, who few people in his administration take seriously.
Trump couldn't even get Mark Esper to deploy troops domestically. Now imagine the hurdles he'd face trying to deploy troops to another country.
He ordered it, and it was executed methodically with over a year of preparation. Everyone was on board, or at least enough people were convinced.
On the contrary, take what happened when Trump wanted to bomb Syria, and people basically didn't let him. Presidents, especially weak, un-respected ones like Trump, can't just do things like that.
Then there's reality. And in reality, not many people respect Trump and are willing to follow his orders. This happens constantly in the news. His own cabinet members openly work against him all the time.
Most recently consider how Mark Esper publically publicly rejected using the Insurrection Act, right over top of Trump.
Now you could say—what if we had some other president? Well, the same social rules would apply to that person as well. Even if they were incredibly charismatic and well-liked and respected, they'd need to clear many social and political hurdles before the airplanes took off.
The president is the commander in chief. In the armed forces following the chain of command is kind of a big deal and there are severe consequences for ignoring a direct moral order from a higher ranked officer.
To me, this means that too much trust is placed in social media, rather than we need to police/secure social media more. Social engineering will always be successful to hack into accounts, and hackers are always 1-step ahead of whatever security measures are in place. It is the trust that our society has placed in social media for news/announcements/politics that is the issue.
That market value was recovered in 5 minutes. It sucks for anyone with stop orders, or anyone who got a margin call; but to say it could start wars is really not giving any credit to the humans in the loop.
Given that Donald Trump basically does policy-making in the open on Twitter these days and foreign countries now treat his account that way, there's an argument to be made that a false tweet on his account could at least push us in the direction of a war.
Thankfully, his account is under special 'lock and key' protection, so a regular CS rep can't hijack it.
I believe they are referring to the fact that they could have theoretically tweeted the wrong thing from the wrong account that could have caused a war. It isn't extremely likely but not comically unrealistic. Definitely within the realm of possibility.
How do you envision that happening? I mean the actual chain of events. A tweet is seen and some general launches all ICBMs? They pour their country’s military might into a war because of a tweet that is known to be fake within 3 minutes? No, it is not within the realm of possibility.
Imagine that this tool could give the attackers access to several primary sources (realdonaldtrump, POTUS, whitehouse) along with a couple news outlets such as Fox News. It would be possible to quickly stir up social unrest and start a lot of local skirmishes that'd take some time to deal with.
And, with conspiracy theorists, imagine the consequences of Trump's account tweeting a distress message that he was attacked and replaced by a clone controlled by QAnon.
In the aggregate sense, it eventually netted out. But a lot of people who sold when it looked like prices were collapsing sure got a pretty decent chunk of their bank accounts "erased".
For a market to move, people need to buy and sell. So while value might not be erased on a global scale if the market recovers to the original position, lots of people will lose (and gain) large amounts of money.
I don't know about many. I don't know of any retail investors that do, and if I did I would have guessed that they'd be buying when prices drop, not selling.
Parent did say “sell / buy” (perhaps they ninja edited). A limit buy order is a basic tool of retail investors (like me :) ) and may have been what parent was thinking of. That said, I don’t agree with parent or great grandparent that the destructive impact is large.
What you call value is really speculations. There is really no association between the value generated by corporations and what the traders think they'll make off trading its stock.
I really think that world leaders twitter accounts should be on completely separate systems from the twitter world. Like a twitter.gov service. It should be insanely locked down, and twitter employees don't have access to it unless they are certified and thoroughly trained. It's just become that important to the stock market and world policy.
They should realize that being too vigilant has its own downsides. Autosell is no magic. It fails to see into the future, it might as well go up the second the shares are sold. Tough luck...
To be honest, I think that would indicate a dysfunction of equity markets, not necessarily a problem of Twitter. I would like Twitter to be not that important. For politics and other topics.
> This twitter hack could have literally destroyed economies, started a war [...etc.]
Woah, slow your roll man, it takes a lot to start a war. And temporary glitches in the market are just that-- temporary glitches. If someone loses their shirt over that they deserve it.
It's not hackers which are the true danger, "legit" people abusing media (whatever it may be) are the threat, a good example would be the Stable Genius.
I don't want to be glib about this, but I will say that it takes a lot to stop a war once it starts, but starting it.. humans have not been known to be most rational actors[1].
The only people who lost money during the bid dry-up during that uncertainty were the people greedy enough to sell. I have no sympathy for people who try to time the market on bad news. Fake headlines is part of the bargain.
To be clear, that value wasn’t erased. The market makers just lowered their willing bid during the uncertainty.
This. It almost seems like a proof of concept for someone selling services to a bigger player, using the Bitcoin angle as a smokescreen.
Something like this right before the election or after could wreak havoc if targeted to the right accounts. I imagine certain state sponsors would pay handsomely for that.
That was my thought as well. A big stunt to show they can take over some of the largest names on Twitter/world as a proof of concept. Think of what they can do if they fan this out at scale to millions of normal accounts.
One way to look at this problem is to ask "how to secure Twitter". Another way to look at this problem is to ask whether people should trust Twitter as an official source of information.
I think there is a big organisational difference between the AP and Twitter, but that's just me. Twitter does not employ journalists. Twitter is not the press.
People who have been interviewed by journalists know they regularly get things wrong, like a game of Telephone Whispers. Journalists are not experts in the topic and get things wrong even when they don't mean to - it might be as simple as mishearing the interviewed person, or rounding up a number that they shouldn't. Sometimes it's far more egregious.
At least when Twitter is secure, you see the exact words that were typed, and not through the filter of a reporter who may have misread.
I've personally been misquoted in media interviews. Not a major thing, but I could now use that newspaper article to claim I've done more than I really have, because hey, the newspapers said I did! It must be true!
(I didn't downvote you though, I think the downvotes are unfair.)
Or maybe it could be seen as a helpful reminder for idiots to not act based on a single source. If some guy on the stock market sells millions of dollar's worth of stock based on a single Tweet, they deserve the consequences.
Or used a more believable scam? They took over coinbase’s Twitter. They could have announced some new trading system and to reserve your spot in the line for the beta deposit $100 worth of bitcoin to this address.
This would potentially add a lot of friction for those users, but maybe that is a fine thing.
Unless we hear more details, it sounds like this attack was able to get around the 2fa for the authentication, so it seems likely they could get around it for posting. Not sure how much would be added with this 2nd level 2fa.
Well, it was just a Bitcoin scam... it had the potential to be huge like the AP hack but the hackers didn't use the exploit to its full potential. Why, I have no idea. Imagine if a raft of prominent blue ticked accounts started tweeting about a disaster. The market would have tanked.
Agreed. This was most likely a "shot across the bow" by a state actor. I have no proof of this. But it's highly public nature would seem to argue against a black-hat commercial interest (e.g. proof of potential to a possible buyer) as it would/will draw too much scrutiny. Also, the crystal clear implication that the damage done could have been far worse, would seem to indicate someone was sending a message. From whom and to whom can only be the subject of speculation, but again, whoever did this must have known that the it would be interpreted as an attack from China to the USA. So either they didn't care because making that obvious was the whole point (ergo, attacker probably China), or the misdirection was the whole point (ergo, attacker probably a power that would stand to benefit from increased tension between USA and China).
>Agreed. This was most likely a "shot across the bow" by a state actor.
The hack would have been a powerful weapon if used in a more strategic way. A "shot across the bow" as a tactic is useless when the weapon can only be used a single time and never again. The code will be patched now.
>Also, the crystal clear implication that the damage done could have been far worse, would seem to indicate someone was sending a message.
That's hindsight knowledge. To me it looks more like an un-sophisticated actor that stumbled over a critical vulnerability and had to use it haphazardly before it somehow becomes obsolete with code update.
>From whom and to whom can only be the subject of speculation, but again, whoever did this must have known that the it would be interpreted as an attack from China to the USA. So either they didn't care because making that obvious was the whole point (ergo, attacker probably China), or the misdirection was the whole point (ergo, attacker probably a power that would stand to benefit from increased tension between USA and China).
Actually I don't see much speculation that China is behind the hack other than from the people who are quick to blame China anyway. The sloppy execution actually speaks against a nation-state actor. The loss of trust in Twitter only plays into Trump's hand regarding his personal feud with the platform.
Back in 2013 when The Associated Press was hacked with a tweet of "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured" and erased $136 billion in equity market value:
Archive: http://archive.is/8lCMV
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/04/23...
This twitter hack could have literally destroyed economies, started a war, potential for black mailing politicians and others etc.
This really needs to be looked at with much bigger eyes. This wasn't just a bitcoin scam.