Haseeb Awan, CEO of Efani, a secure and private cell phone service, talks about how he became acquainted with hackers who took over prominent accounts on Twitter last week. He describes:

  • the underground industry that steals cell phone numbers and why
  • who the main players, Kirk, lol and “ever so anxious” are
  • what the hackers did when they took hold of prominent accounts, such as those of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and those of crypto companies such as Binance and Coinbase
  • what the hackers could do with the information that they obtained with the accounts they took over
  • why this was likely not a pre-planned attack
  • what happened to the security of the Twitter accounts, and why their second-factor authentication protections did not keep their accounts from being hacked
  • what lessons crypto people can take away from the Twitter hack and how they can protect themselves

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Episode links: 

Haseeb Awan: https://twitter.com/haseeb

Efani: https://www.efani.com

The New York Times story detailing the hack: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/technology/twitter-hackers-interview.html?searchResultPosition=3

Chainalysis analysis of the Bitcoin obtained in the hack: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/twitter-hack-july-2020-update

Twitter’s account of the hack: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/an-update-on-our-security-incident.html

Analysis by Krebs on Security: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/whos-behind-wednesdays-epic-twitter-hack/

The recounting by the holder of the @6 account: https://medium.com/@lucky225/the-twitter-hack-what-exactly-happened-d8740d33c1c

Coinbase preventing customers from sending money to the hackers: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/72200/coinbase-says-it-prevented-over-1000-customers-from-sending-280000-worth-of-bitcoin-to-twitter-hackers

Fortune on why the attackers will have a hard time cashing out: http://links.info.fortune.com/e/evib?_t=5c2d888702774d17aa3d0350287b6d73&_m=4ecf0f55469542a782a36f0ec9d8df09&_e=EaRX5Sk3zpaQLYk6z4FZ9OwiLdl6CTboSs0AyX9UekCl-VWvzN8z8oZ2pelKQ5oGqAiv5DUuK6FhjOY1tputGIU-mTcXNHxotHGTm1cA2_L6YhT_jsJ_DRRCpdFSGEbh 

Convo between two of the hackers: https://i.imgur.com/aJUDLrI.png

Links from news recap:

https://unchainedpodcast.com/dear-bank-hodl-my-crypto/