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.
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