From this post by Byrne Hobart (which also includes a discussion of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon):
There just isn’t a great supply chain linking the ability to move markets through hacks to the ability to realize profits from those hacks. Both skills exist, independently, but the social gap, information gap, and trust gap make it almost impossible for the two to combine. Add that to the low probability of the hacks themselves—it’s not every day that someone exploits a major tech tech company so effectively—and the odds drop to nearly nil.This is assuming that whatever the hackers did did not give them access to the account holders' DMs:
This is good news. The fact that cheesy Bitcoin scams work means that hackers have an incentive to break into vulnerable companies. But the fact that they work a lot better than more drastic exploits means that Bitcoin creates a sort of global bug bounty. If Bitcoin scammers hadn’t found this vulnerability, maybe North Korean hackers or the PLA would have.
Holy shit. The bitcoin scam is simply for proof of identity in the future. Brilliant, and way way waaaay more evil.— DeWitt Clinton (@dewitt) July 15, 2020
Explanation: The real play is blackmailing the account holders. The perpetrators can now prove they (alone) hold the data by making a transaction at that address.— DeWitt Clinton (@dewitt) July 15, 2020
More explanation: And not just for the DMs. If the perps simjacked their way into the Twitter accounts, they likely simjacked their way into more, like FB. They don't have to be public about that part.— DeWitt Clinton (@dewitt) July 15, 2020
For those saying "I can't believe they burned those accounts just for a bitcoin scam" -- they didn't. They had to burn them all at once. The real scam (blackmail) can happen at their leisure now.— DeWitt Clinton (@dewitt) July 15, 2020
