#nazialmanya hack: What we know and what we don't

Today many twitter accounts – some of them by political institutions and celebrities – have been sending out tweets with hashtags #nazialmanya and #nazihollanda. These accounts have been hacked. Among them are @Europarl_EN, @_Bercy_ und @welt.

Because we are analyzing a lot of political relevant messages, we could find 19 accounts in our database that have to be compromised. All of them are political institutions, journalists, companies or data analysists. From 8:45 onwards we have been tracking the hashtags and till now we found 1370 tweets. Some are retweets, some seem to be sent from a botnet that is supporting the attack.

So what happened?

The company twitter counter (@thecounter) has probably been hacked. We suppose that all compromised accounts have used this service. So, not twitter has been hacked (probably). How did the hackers post on the twitter accounts? Twitter counter says they do not store twitter credentials. So, one possible solution would be that the app of twitter counter has the right to post in the name of users who have approved this service. Our guess is, someone has stolen some passwords, perhapse as hashed passwords, and then used this information.

What is quite strange is that not all accounts were posting the #nazialmanya tweets at the same time. As a strategy, this looks quite weired, because the attackers will have known that the effect of their attack would vanish soon with twitter taking counter meassured.

Summing up:

The attack has some elements that look very professional: a hack (if it was one) is not a walk through. A supporting botnet (if there really is one) is not something, every hacker has at hand. On the other hand, the fact that the accounts where posting one after another does not seem very professional. We would argue therefore: it was (probably) a professional hack but not by a state agency with unlimeted resources.

Who is doing this?

No one knows!!! It is no coincidence that this has happened today when there is an election in the Netherlands. It is easy to argue that this operations helps right-wing guys from NL more than Turkish nationalists.

 This fast and dirty overview was created by the Political Data Science team:

 Juan Carlos, Fabienne, Morry, Orestis and Simon.