Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/17 – Is A 21-Year-Old British Hacker Behind The Great Twitter Hijacking?

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Brian Krebs has a theory of who specifically he thinks was behind the Twitter hijack, but other people have theories too. Netflix kicks off tech earnings season, but also makes a pretty interesting executive move. And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com Discover.bot/podcast Links: Who’s Behind Wednesday’s Epic Twitter Hack? (Krebs on Security) 130 high-profile Twitter accounts targeted in hacking attack (The Guardian) Netflix shares fall after earnings miss, weak subscriber guidance for third quarter (CNBC) Weekend Longreads Suggestions Some of Reddit's Wildest Relationship Stories Are Lies. I'd Know – I Wrote Them (Motherboard) Google’s secretive ATAP lab is imagining the future of smart devices (Fast Company) Inside Peacock’s Ambitious Plan to Crash a Crowded Streaming Field (Variety) Everything you need to know about Palantir, the secretive company coming for all your data (Recode) Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of Ethereum’s 2014 Premine (Coindesk) Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel (MondayNote) https://zoom.us/j/93965359337?pwd=d2RsK0VCaGhxRVJMUGxQRUh6NVdqdz09 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Techmeme right home for Friday, July 17th, 2020. I'm Brian McClellan today. Brian Krebs has a theory about who specifically he thinks was behind the Twitter hijack, but other people have theories too. Netflix kicks off tech earnings season, but also makes a pretty interesting executive move. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So what do we know about the big Twitter attack at this point? Well, as you'd expect, Brian Krebs is on the case, and he's, suggesting or alleging that the attack may have been perpetrated by a Joseph James Connor, a 21-year-old English sim swapper who goes by the handle Plug Walk Joe and who has links to a group that hijacked Jack Dorsey's personal Twitter account last year, quoting Krebs. There are strong indications that this attack was perpetrated by individuals who've traditionally specialized in hijacking social media accounts via sim swapping, an increasingly rampant form of crime that involves bribing, hacking, or coercing employees at mobile phone and social media companies into providing access to a target's account. People within the sim swapping community

are obsessed with hijacking so-called OG social media accounts, short for original gangster. OG accounts typically are those with short profile names such as at the letter B or say at Joe. Possession of these OG accounts confers a measure of status and perceived influence and wealth in swim-swapping circles. As such accounts can often fetch thousands of dollars when resold in the underground. In the days leading up to Wednesday's attack on Twitter, there were signs that some actors in the sim-swapping community were selling the ability to change an email address tied to any Twitter account. In a post on OG users, a forum dedicated to account hijacking, a user named Chewan advertised they could change email addresses tied to any Twitter account for $250 and provide

direct access to accounts for between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece. Krebson security heard from a source who works in security at one of the largest U.S.-based mobile carriers who said the Joe and dead Instagram accounts are tied to a notorious sim swapper who goes by the nickname Plug Walk Joe. Investigators have been tracking PlugWalk Joe because he has thought to have been involved in multiple sim swapping attacks over the years that preceded high dollar Bitcoin heise, end quote. I recommend reading the whole Krebs piece as he details all of the sleuthing work that has led him to this conclusion. In short, it might be ironic, but plug-walk Joe might have been enmassed via run-of-the-mill social

engineering tricks. But p.S. sources are saying the FBI is also leading a federal inquiry into this hack, and Twitter says it has found no evidence that hackers gained access to user passwords or any other user data. but, and I know nothing about this space, but I kind of side with what Tim Herrera says here. He tweeted, quote, I know this is me with another conspiracy theory, but it's one I sincerely believe. The Bitcoin part of the Twitter hack was a smokescreen and the real damage will be ongoing and invisible for months slash years, and when we finally see it, we're all going to be like, oh, we're effed. If you could control every verified account, you would tweet a scam, one is going to fall for. Nah. Anyway, expect all your DMs to show up in a data dump next year. Do

whatever you need to do to prepare for that, I guess, end quote. By the way, one more detail just came down right before I started recording from Twitter itself. In its first official comment since the hack, Twitter says, a total of 130 accounts were affected, but the hackers were only able to gain control and send tweets from a small subset of those 130 accounts. Quote, the Guardian understands Twitter has reassured account holders that passwords were not accessed in the attack, but has been unable to provide the same certainty when it comes to other private information, including the contents of direct messages. Quote, we are continuing to assess whether non-public data related to these accounts was compromised

and will provide updates if we determine that occurred, Twitter said, end quote. Tech earnings season is upon us once again, but before we get to that, let me get to some big news that was made with the first. earnings report, before I get to the numbers, Netflix officially named Ted Sarandos as co-CEO of the company and appointed chief product officer Greg Peters as C-O-O. Existing long-time CEO, Reed Hastings, said that day-to-day operations will not change. In spite of this change in titles, Sarandos has largely been understood to be the force behind Netflix's creative and content production efforts, and Hastings says he is excited to continue at the

company, now in a co-CEO capacity, quoting CNBC. Sarandos helped push Netflix to create and then ramp up its original TV shows and movies, such as Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, and the Irishman. That's helped cement his legacy as one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, end quote. So the obvious way to read this is that Netflix is setting up succession planning. Expect Ted Sarandos to eventually, someday, maybe sooner or rather than later, be the sole CEO of Netflix when Reed Hastings rides off into the sunset whenever that may be. Though it should be noted that Greg Peters had been touted as a possible company leader himself

someday, so it's notable that Netflix is moving him up to keep him in the fold, I guess. Meanwhile, Netflix reported Q2 revenue of $6.15 billion up 24.9% year over year and said that it expects 2.5 million net subscriber editions for Q3, but analyst estimates were for 5.27 million, So Netflix beat revenue expectations, but it's that net subscriber ad number that is always key for Netflix, and that wasn't good. Saying this probably did not make things any better. Quote, growth is slowing as consumers get through the initial shock of COVID and social restrictions, the company said, end quote. That's why the stock has been down as much as 9% since reporting. Quoting once more from CNBC, Netflix, which in the past has named everything from Snapchat to sleep.

As a competitor now counts social media app TikTok among its rivals. TikTok's growth is astounding, showing the fluidity of internet entertainment, the company wrote to shareholders. Instead of worrying about all these competitors, we continue to stick to our strategy of trying to improve our service and content every quarter faster than our peers. Our continued strong growth is a testament to this approach and the size of the entertainment market, end quote. Netflix said, it does not expect its 2020 slate of content to be significantly impacted

by production shutdowns created by the pandemic. It expects that current production setbacks will push more of its big titles to the end of 2021, but that the, quote, total number of originals for the full year will still be higher than 2020. Netflix plans to supplement its original content with other films and shows it's acquired, end quote. When Reed Hastings was asked on the call about his plans at Netflix going forward, he said, quote, I'm in for a decade, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestion.

First, let's start with one that has kind of broken my heart a bit. You know that famous subreddit R-slash relationships, where people supposedly go to post relationship stories, seeking advice, and the weirder stories tend to get shared around the internet. Yeah, well, it turns out a lot of those stories are fake. Not all of them, but maybe more than you would have thought, quoting motherboard. There's no way of knowing how many popular posts on R-slash relationships are faked. Shal, one of the owners of the at Reddit chip,

Twitter account believes it's only, quote, a very small fraction. Last year, a journalist from the Atlantic interviewed the moderators of R-slash relationships and discovered that the space is heavily controlled. Moderators are more than happy to delete threads and ban users, and any posts that is linked to elsewhere on the internet is removed. Yet despite the mod's best efforts, faked posts remain a staple of the sub, as well as similar subs such as R-slash-relationship underscore advice and R-S-M-I-the-A-hole. What motivates people to make up relationship drama and why are so many of us willing to believe ridiculous stories, end quote? Read the piece to find out, I guess. Next, Fast Company went inside Google's secretive ATAP lab, where they're cooking up any number of next generation smart devices,

quote, though ATAP has changed quite a bit from its early days, its ambitions remain expansive. Adopting the bass tones of movie trailer narrator Don LaFontaine for emphasis, Kaufman recounts the pitch he gave other high-muckety-mucks when discussing potential efforts. I say, imagine a world in which this thing existed. If you want to forget all your objections, just go on a fantasy with me. If I could build this, would you want it? If I can't get a yes, then it's probably not that good of an idea, he says. If I get a, yeah, that'd be great, but how are you going to do that?

That's why we're here, end quote. If you're into G-Wiz Next Generation Pie in the Sky Gadgetary, check this piece out for some of the interesting things in ATAP's pipeline. And a couple of profiles now. First, Peacock debuted this week, as we discussed, but I thought I'd also share this deep dive into Peacock's strategy from variety, because again, strategy is especially important with Peacock because they're arriving late, as we said. Quote, Strauss, chairman of Peacock and NBCU Digital Enterprises, doesn't have everything he wanted for the streaming service's big debut. Most of the Peacock Original slate has been delayed by COVID-19. The service will come out with just nine originals, which include a slick series adaptation of Brave New World and UK-set workplace comedy Intelligence,

starring David Schwimmer. The Summer Olympics were postponed until 2021, depriving the launch of some valuable promotional real estate. And within two weeks before go time, Peacock had deals for Apple, Google, Xbox, and Vizio, and LG TVs, but still had not clinched distribution packs with Roku or Amazon Fire TV, the two biggest over-the-top TV device makers. But Strauss remained undeterred, convinced that Peacock's greatest potential lies in the free-to-watch tier, with a light advertising load that promises no more than five minutes of commercials per hour. NBCU's theory is that free as a bird will resonate with millions of Americans who are financially strapped or just too maxed out to pay for yet another streaming package, end quote.

And when I discussed Palantir making plans to go public, I realized we probably hadn't spoken that much about Palantir on this show in the past. So here's a profile from Recode telling you more about what Palantir actually does and why, in some circles, it's somewhat controversial, quote, Palantir's work, the government agencies that contracted and the relative lack of details about the company's inner workings, mean it's often seen as secretive, all-knowing, all-knowing, and even malevolent. Seven years after touting Palantir's terrorism-fighting abilities, Bloomberg Business Week ran a feature on the company with the headline, Palantir knows everything about you. In a book with the phrase, destroying democracy in the title, Robert Shear called Palantir

a, quote, monstrous government snoop, mining our most intimate data, end quote. The company's software has been criticized for its dragnet ways, pulling in records about millions of innocent people, so it can catch a few possible criminals, end quote. Next, this week's history pick comes from crypto history. Coin desk takes a look back at one of the sales of the century, really, the inside story of Ethereum's debut back in 2014. Before there were initial coin offerings, something that Ethereum made possible, by the way, this was the mother of initial coin offerings before they were even a thing.

Quote, by the end of the sale, people behind those jumbled addresses had bought more than 60 million ether, which at around 30 cents per coin amounted to $18.3 million. It was a huge success. There had been only five similar crowd sales done by cryptocurrency projects before Ethereum's Genesis sale, and the second largest raise had been by Madesafe for $6 million. It was also a success compared with crowd sales in general. general. Seven months later, Mihae would publish a blog post that said, quote, according to Wikipedia, Ethereum is rated as the second biggest crowdfunded project in the

history of the internet, sitting proudly next to the first occupant that raised over 70 million, but over the course of years, not 42 days, end quote. A whole new financing model had been tested, one where a rag-tag group of feuding hackers with no business plan and no live product, let alone users or revenue, could raise millions of dollars from thousands of people all over the world. Before, anyone who wanted to buy stock in big tech firms like Facebook or Google would need a U.S. bank account. Things got even more complicated for those who wanted to invest in startups that hadn't gone to the public markets to raise funds. Now anyone could be an investor in one of the most cutting-edge technology companies out there. All they needed was an internet connection

and at least dot zero one Bitcoin, end quote. And finally, Jean-Louis Gasei wonders if maybe at long last, we are bearing witness to the death of Wintel, that partnership between Microsoft and Intel that basically was the foundational structure of the tech industry, going back to at least the late 80s. Quote, this leaves Microsoft with a choice. Either forget Windows on Arm and cede modern PCs to Apple or forge ahead, fix app compatibility problems and offer an arm-based alternative to Apple's new Macs. It's a false dilemma, of course.

Microsoft will forge ahead with repercussions for the rest of the Windows. PC industry. Specifically, what are Dell, HP, ASUS, and others going to do if Apple offers materially better laptops and desktops and Microsoft continues to improve Windows on Arm surface devices? In order to compete, PC manufacturers will have to follow suit. They'll go Arm because, all defensive rhetoric aside, Apple and Microsoft will have made the X-86 architecture feel like what it actually is. Old. This won't happen overnight, and there will be an interesting mess of x86 and arm system on a chip machines fighting it out in the marketplace. Large organizations need continuity and would bulk at the prospect of servicing two kinds

of Windows machines and apps. As usual, they'll downplay Apple's advantage and curse Microsoft for causing trouble. But if the new machines are actually better, rogue members within these organizations will sneak in new devices and software. They always do, end quote. So if you check out the very bottom of today's show notes, you will see the link to the Zoom call. That will be our listener, Colin, episode tomorrow. I have the link spelled out in the show notes, but also, in case this is useful, the meeting ID is 939-65359337. And this time, we've got a password about 10 minutes before we start the meeting. I'll post the full link on the subreddit again, but this is the only place that you will be able to get the password. So write it down or come back here

and get it again tomorrow. The password will be 745364. Again, that's 745364. Trying to avoid those Zoom bombers this time around. And remember, I do want to try to use the video to post to YouTube if we are successfully able to avoid the Zoom Bombers. So keep that in mind if you do raise your hand to ask a question. And the time again will be 1 p.m. Eastern Time U.S.

tomorrow Saturday. So what is that? Five p.m. UTC. Anyway, should be fun. I'll post the audio to the podcast feeds right afterwards so you can listen even if you don't participate. I already got some great questions lined up. Talk to you all then.