david wong

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.

How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username posted January 2014

So this guy owned @N on twitter and got extorted his account by a phishing attack. The story is well written and you should read it here : https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd

but for a tl;dr the attacker called his paypal account to ask them for his credit card's last 4 digits. Then he called godaddy to ask them to reset the password. They only asked him for the 2 first digits and the last 4s. The attacker just had to guess the 2 first digits (and he did it on the first try, he could have kept calling and trying otherwise).

Now that he had @N's domain's name, he could now see his emails. Took over @N's facebook account and started mailing him "threats".

It's pretty crazy how easy phishing is.

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