Regina social media expert speculates on cause, effect of Twitter hack

High-profile Twitter accounts were hacked in a security breach on Wednesday.

Malicious scammers tweeted from accounts belonging to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates and more trying to convince their followers to send money.

Dr. Alec Couros, a professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina, gave some insight into how an attack like that can happen.

He thinks the hackers likely used a technique called “social engineering.”

“Rather than using brute-force hacking or having access to any passwords … there’s probably something that has happened where someone got the keys to the Twitter kingdom through trickery, deception, or maybe even an insider when it comes to Twitter’s back door,” he explained.

“What has probably happened here is someone at Twitter was tricked or convinced to let someone have access to these accounts.”

While there have been hacks on individual accounts in the past, Couros was shocked at the scale of this crime.

“Most critics are saying this is the biggest hack the site has seen yet … To see this many accounts exploited — not just that they’ve been able to control these accounts, but this many accounts — really does show something else has happened,” he said.

Using that method, he estimates the hacker was able to get ahold of administrative passwords in order to gain access to the accounts.

The posts asked victims to pay through Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that is difficult to trace. While this may seem an optimal setup for the crime, Couros is worried this could be just the beginning.

“It seems like a rather strange scam to pull, because there are probably more lucrative ones you could get into given the type of information you have access to,” he speculated.

He thinks the scammers could have access to private messages and other information tied to a person’s account, and not just for the celebrity accounts of which they gained control.

“Administrative access may allow you to download all sorts of information from multiple accounts, perhaps millions of accounts at once,” he said.

“Once you have this power, you likely have a lot more power than we actually know … Perhaps the Bitcoin part of it is just a decoy for what they might have done. There could be something even more sinister that has happened here.”