The only job he should have is working at a used car dealership.
He’s a smooth-talking con man folks. The government has enough of those.
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Three People Charged in Twitter Bitcoin Hack [Updated]
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The only job he should have is working at a used car dealership.
He’s a smooth-talking con man folks. The government has enough of those.
To consult on what? How not to hand over passwords and other sensitive information to people posing as employees?
The knowledge needed to defeat this kind of con isn’t really a secret. I work at a bank and we have periodic courses on how to spot phishing/social engineering attempts just like this.
I would have imagined Twitter would have the same, and maybe they do and the kid got lucky by getting some some easily duped Twitter employees on the phone. But you really don’t need crooks to teach you this stuff.
History tells us that there will always be con games and people that fall for them. It doesn’t tell us that there is something magical about the way they work...particularly ones like this.
The kid isn’t the first person to attempt a social engineering con. He is nothing special. But if putting him on a pedestal turns your crank then have at it I guess.
I see the point from a technical perspective. However with technological safety nets improving constantly the weakest link are the humans. Human hacking or social engineering is an actual skill and does highlight the weaknesses in any system. Often now much easier to exploit than technological routes. But require skills nevertheless.
Haha. I am still not sure if he was admitting that he was wrong about what he said or if he was saying that I was wrong.
100% agree. It is a skill. Just like selling used cars to people is a skill.
My point is, like selling used cars, it’s not a novel skill. He didn’t come up with anything new. Twitter knows what he did so they don’t need him to explain it to them. It’s an internal training issue at this point.
My hunch is that his odds of success were increased by Twitter possibly lowering its information security standards (unofficially) to accommodate everyone working remotely due to COVID. Good timing probably had as much to do with his success as his con skills did.
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For some of my responses below, let’s assume that I’m a manager and I have 20-25 IT professionals on my staff. Let’s also assume that many of them are coders and almost all of them are knowledgeable about things like security, audits, and government compliance, and that they all know about our corporate policies.
I doubt it. More on that in a minute...
No! When you pay for something, you get more of that thing. Why don’t people get this?
Ugh, another one! I wouldn’t hire ANYBODY convicted of a crime. Because then every NEW bad thing that person does would come to roost at MY office, even after they transfer to another department! No, No, No!
From one extreme to the other. “Life long?” In a society that lets hardened criminals loose during a pandemic? There is no such thing as a life-long sentence now.
Apple couldn’t hire him. No way. I’d go so far as to say that he’s toxic now for most any company. He would be Kryptonite to my hiring super powers!
No they won’t. There’s a path toward that kind of work, and in 2020, doing it without being sanctioned for it is likely going to be the kiss of death for any real career possibilities. All he has shown is that he has poor judgment, and for that alone, I doubt he’d be hirable in the banking, medical, or aerospace/defense industries, and probably not for any business that takes payments from customers in the form of credit cards or checks.
45 years is excessive when gangbangers get little or no jail time for rape and murder. Can we give THEM 45 years and start with this dood at something a bit less than that?
There are a lot of factors at play here. It may not be the fault of the techs, especially if they knew of the risk and had reported it to management before this all happened. That happens a lot, by the way. This could actually be a management (or senior management) problem. And we may or may not ever really find out for sure.
Prison upon conviction, yes. 10 or 15 years sounds about right to me, as long as they are forced to serve at least 95% of their sentence. No time off for good behavior and no time off for pandemics. The incentive against crime must be strong, or we’ll have more crime.
UK had to leave the EU, for survival. The Eurotrash Union will bleed healthy countries dry in order to keep propping up those that are insolvent. The UK had to leave. I would have left. Hell, you probably would have left too!
The difference here is that Florida reports on its own stupid people, whereas other states hide theirs.Florida, like most of the US, is more rural than most people expect.
Hence we end up with the intellectual deficit that became nationally evident in November roughly four years ago.
Rehabilitation, yes. But his professional life is likely over with, for the reasons I noted above.
45 years is appropriate for 1st degree murder. I think somebody else needs an intervention first!
Only if it’s for the full 10. Otherwise, we’re just playing cops-n-robbers like a bunch of kids.
I get you, but really...the dumb@ss really just screwed himself over. I couldn’t hire him. Unless I managed sanitation workers who only worked in public places or at places still under construction. But if any of my employees had to go into people homes or businesses? No way, come hell or high water, would I hire him. He did this to himself!
The problem here is not that people want to give him 45 years. The problem is that most people are okay with a slap on the wrist for heinous crimes. And we seem to be okay with judges letting real criminals off with little more than a scolding. And early release programs. Now, all this builds up frustration over time for some, and so now they just want to see somebody thrown into the dungeon and have the key thrown away. I get that. But giving this young person life would not fix even one real problem with our criminal justice system.
It actually does matter. If we penalize for EACH committal of a crime, we will get less crime. The problem is, too many courts and judges make sentences run concurrently. So we end up getting more of the thing we don’t want!
And there’s another point to be made. If I’m interviewing 10 young people, most of whom have kept themselves out of trouble, and oh by the way, actually studied in school while others found ways to run a business or engage in some kind of endeavor to help people, then WHY, just WHY would I hire a yahoo like this? It’s a serious question.
Maximum penalty may be given, but that is rare. And it is even more RARELY served in its entirety.
A society should be able to set the penalty wherever they wish. But mostly I’m with you. I’d rather see gangbangers convicted of rape and murder spend a half-century in jail.
Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible he did something to self-disclose. If so, then it’s quite possibly fair game. I don’t know, maybe an attorney will weigh in here.
Yes. Yes they are. If you write an iOS app and knock it out of the park, I could possibly hire you (if I were hiring and if I were looking for that skill). But if you do a big scam, well that’s a big no-no in my book. What do you think, I would trust you to be a team player? I would trust you to abide by our corporate policies? Be honest and truthful in your dealings with your teammates and customers? Hell no! If you are a convicted scammer, you are not for my team, and you proved it for me.
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Very true, but I was talking about it from a more technical perspective. Software development require excellent organizational skills and discipline. Without them, you write bad code. A hacker is almost the exact opposite. Doesn't matter what kind of obscene code you need to write, if it breaks what you're trying to break, it's good enough.
Beyond the basics that many people learn in school these days, the two roles are almost night and day.
While those attributes would perhaps generally apply, that's not always the case by quite a bit.
Definitely requires a different way of looking at what one is seeing indeed. And that is the same with social engineering, it really is a skill and not everyone can do that.