Thousands of people graduate from colleges and universities each year with cybersecurity or computer science degrees only to find employers are less than thrilled about their hands-on, foundational skills. Here’s a look at a recent survey that identified some of the bigger skills gaps, and some thoughts about how those seeking a career in these fields can better stand out from the crowd.

Virtually every week KrebsOnSecurity receives at least one email from someone seeking advice on how to break into cybersecurity as a career. In most cases, the aspirants ask which certifications they should seek, or what specialization in computer security might hold the brightest future.

Rarely am I asked which practical skills they should seek to make themselves more appealing candidates for a future job. And while I always preface any response with the caveat that I don’t hold any computer-related certifications or degrees myself, I do speak with C-level executives in cybersecurity and recruiters on a regular basis and frequently ask them for their impressions of today’s cybersecurity job candidates.

A common theme in these C-level executive responses is that a great many candidates simply lack hands-on experience with the more practical concerns of operating, maintaining and defending the information systems which drive their businesses.

Granted, most people who have just graduated with a degree lack practical experience. But happily, a somewhat unique aspect of cybersecurity is that one can gain a fair degree of mastery of hands-on skills and foundational knowledge through self-directed study and old fashioned trial-and-error.

One key piece of advice I nearly always include in my response to readers involves learning the core components of how computers and other devices communicate with one another. I say this because a mastery of networking is a fundamental skill that so many other areas of learning build upon. Trying to get a job in security without a deep understanding of how data packets work is a bit like trying to become a chemical engineer without first mastering the periodic table of elements.

But please don’t take my word for it. The SANS Institute, a Bethesda, Md. based security research and training firm, recently conducted a survey of more than 500 cybersecurity practitioners at 284 different companies in an effort to suss out which skills they find most useful in job candidates, and which are most frequently lacking.

The survey asked respondents to rank various skills from “critical” to “not needed.” Fully 85 percent ranked networking as a critical or “very important” skill, followed by a mastery of the Linux operating system (77 percent), Windows (73 percent), common exploitation techniques (73 percent), computer architectures and virtualization (67 percent) and data and cryptography (58 percent). Perhaps surprisingly, only 39 percent ranked programming as a critical or very important skill (I’ll come back to this in a moment).

How did the cybersecurity practitioners surveyed grade their pool of potential job candidates on these critical and very important skills? The results may be eye-opening:

“Employers report that student cybersecurity preparation is largely inadequate and are frustrated that they have to spend months searching before they find qualified entry-level employees if any can be found,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. “We hypothesized that the beginning of a pathway toward resolving those challenges and helping close the cybersecurity skills gap would be to isolate the capabilities that employers expected but did not find in cybersecurity graduates.”

The truth is, some of the smartest, most insightful and talented computer security professionals I know today don’t have any computer-related certifications under their belts. In fact, many of them never even went to college or completed a university-level degree program.

Rather, they got into security because they were passionately and intensely curious about the subject, and that curiosity led them to learn as much as they could — mainly by reading, doing, and making mistakes (lots of them).

I mention this not to dissuade readers from pursuing degrees or certifications in the field (which may be a basic requirement for many corporate HR departments) but to emphasize that these should not be viewed as some kind of golden ticket to a rewarding, stable and relatively high-paying career.

More to the point, without a mastery of one or more of the above-mentioned skills, you simply will not be a terribly appealing or outstanding job candidate when the time comes.

BUT..HOW?

So what should you focus on, and what’s the best way to get started? First, understand that while there are a near infinite number of ways to acquire knowledge and virtually no limit to the depths you can explore, getting your hands dirty is the fastest way to learning.

No, I’m not talking about breaking into someone’s network, or hacking some poor website. Please don’t do that without permission. If you must target third-party services and sites, stick to those that offer recognition and/or incentives for doing so through bug bounty programs, and then make sure you respect the boundaries of those programs.

Besides, almost anything you want to learn by doing can be replicated locally. Hoping to master common vulnerability and exploitation techniques? There are innumerable free resources available; purpose-built exploitation toolkits like Metasploit, WebGoat, and custom Linux distributions like Kali Linux that are well supported by tutorials and videos online. Then there are a number of free reconnaissance and vulnerability discovery tools like Nmap, Nessus, OpenVAS and Nikto. This is by no means a complete list.

Set up your own hacking labs. You can do this with a spare computer or server, or with older hardware that is plentiful and cheap on places like eBay or Craigslist. Free virtualization tools like VirtualBox can make it simple to get friendly with different operating systems without the need of additional hardware.

Or look into paying someone else to set up a virtual server that you can poke at. Amazon’s EC2 services are a good low-cost option here. If it’s web application testing you wish to learn, you can install any number of web services on computers within your own local network, such as older versions of WordPress, Joomla or shopping cart systems like Magento.

Want to learn networking? Start by getting a decent book on TCP/IP and really learning the network stack and how each layer interacts with the other.

And while you’re absorbing this information, learn to use some tools that can help put your newfound knowledge into practical application. For example, familiarize yourself with Wireshark and Tcpdump, handy tools relied upon by network administrators to troubleshoot network and security problems and to understand how network applications work (or don’t). Begin by inspecting your own network traffic, web browsing and everyday computer usage. Try to understand what applications on your computer are doing by looking at what data they are sending and receiving, how, and where.

ON PROGRAMMING

While being able to program in languages like Go, Java, Perl, Python, C or Ruby may or may not be at the top of the list of skills demanded by employers, having one or more languages in your skillset is not only going to make you a more attractive hire, it will also make it easier to grow your knowledge and venture into deeper levels of mastery.

It is also likely that depending on which specialization of security you end up pursuing, at some point you will find your ability to expand that knowledge is somewhat limited without understanding how to code.

For those intimidated by the idea of learning a programming language, start by getting familiar with basic command line tools on Linux. Just learning to write basic scripts that automate specific manual tasks can be a wonderful stepping stone. What’s more, a mastery of creating shell scripts will pay handsome dividends for the duration of your career in almost any technical role involving computers (regardless of whether you learn a specific coding language).

GET HELP

Make no mistake: Much like learning a musical instrument or a new language, gaining cybersecurity skills takes most people a good deal of time and effort. But don’t get discouraged if a given topic of study seems overwhelming at first; just take your time and keep going.

That’s why it helps to have support groups. Seriously. In the cybersecurity industry, the human side of networking takes the form of conferences and local meetups. I cannot stress enough how important it is for both your sanity and career to get involved with like-minded people on a semi-regular basis.

Many of these gatherings are free, including Security BSides events, DEFCON groups, and OWASP chapters. And because the tech industry continues to be disproportionately populated by men, there are also a number cybersecurity meetups and membership groups geared toward women, such as the Women’s Society of Cyberjutsu and others listed here.

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, chances are there’s a number of security conferences and security meetups in your general area. But even if you do reside in the boonies, the good news is many of these meetups are going virtual to avoid the ongoing pestilence that is the COVID-19 epidemic.

In summary, don’t count on a degree or certification to prepare you for the kinds of skills employers are going to understandably expect you to possess. That may not be fair or as it should be, but it’s likely on you to develop and nurture the skills that will serve your future employer(s) and employability in this field.

I’m certain that readers here have their own ideas about how newbies, students and those contemplating a career shift into cybersecurity can best focus their time and efforts. Please feel free to sound off in the comments. I may even update this post to include some of the better recommendations.

In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had exposed approximately 885 million records related to mortgage deals going back to 2003. On Wednesday, regulators in New York announced that First American was the target of their first ever cybersecurity enforcement action in connection with the incident, charges that could bring steep financial penalties.

Santa Ana, Calif.-based First American [NYSE:FAF] is a leading provider of title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. It employs some 18,000 people and brought in $6.2 billion in 2019.

As first reported here last year, First American’s website exposed 16 years worth of digitized mortgage title insurance records — including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images.

The documents were available without authentication to anyone with a Web browser.

According to a filing (PDF) by the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), the weakness that exposed the documents was first introduced during an application software update in May 2014 and went undetected for years.

Worse still, the DFS found, the vulnerability was discovered in a penetration test First American conducted on its own in December 2018.

“Remarkably, Respondent instead allowed unfettered access to the personal and financial data of millions of its customers for six more months until the breach and its serious ramifications were widely publicized by a nationally recognized cybersecurity industry journalist,” the DFS explained in a statement on the charges.

Reuters reports that the penalties could be significant for First American: The DFS considers each instance of exposed personal information a separate violation, and the company faces penalties of up to $1,000 per violation.

In a written statement, First American said it strongly disagrees with the DFS’s findings, and that its own investigation determined only a “very limited number” of consumers — and none from New York — had personal data accessed without permission.

In August 2019, the company said a third-party investigation into the exposure identified just 32 consumers whose non-public personal information likely was accessed without authorization.

When KrebsOnSecurity asked last year how long it maintained access logs or how far back in time that review went, First American declined to be more specific, saying only that its logs covered a period that was typical for a company of its size and nature.

But in Wednesday’s filing, the DFS said First American was unable to determine whether records were accessed prior to Jun 2018.

“Respondent’s forensic investigation relied on a review of web logs retained from June 2018 onward,” the DFS found. “Respondent’s own analysis demonstrated that during this 11-month period, more than 350,000 documents were accessed without authorization by automated ‘bots’ or ‘scraper’ programs designed to collect information on the Internet.

The records exposed by First American would have been a virtual gold mine for phishers and scammers involved in so-called Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, which often impersonate real estate agents, closing agencies, title and escrow firms in a bid to trick property buyers into wiring funds to fraudsters. According to the FBI, BEC scams are the most costly form of cybercrime today.

First American’s stock price fell more than 6 percent the day after news of their data leak was published here. In the days that followed, the DFS and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission each announced they were investigating the company.

First American released its first quarter 2020 earnings today. A hearing on the charges alleged by the DFS is slated for Oct. 26.

The New York Times last week ran an interview with several young men who claimed to have had direct contact with those involved in last week’s epic hack against Twitter. These individuals said they were only customers of the person who had access to Twitter’s internal employee tools, and were not responsible for the actual intrusion or bitcoin scams that took place that day. But new information suggests that at least two of them operated a service that resold access to Twitter employees for the purposes of modifying or seizing control of prized Twitter profiles.

As first reported here on July 16, prior to bitcoin scam messages being blasted out from such high-profile Twitter accounts @barackobama, @joebiden, @elonmusk and @billgates, several highly desirable short-character Twitter account names changed hands, including @L, @6 and @W.

Known as “original gangster” or “OG” accounts, short-character profile names confer a measure of status and wealth in certain online communities, and such accounts can often fetch thousands of dollars when resold in the underground.

The people involved in obtaining those OG accounts on July 15 said they got them from a person identified only as “Kirk,” who claimed to be a Twitter employee. According to The Times, Kirk first reached out to the group through a hacker who used the screen name “lol” on OGusers, a forum dedicated to helping users hijack and resell OG accounts from Twitter and other social media platforms. From The Times’s story:

“The hacker ‘lol’ and another one he worked with, who went by the screen name ‘ever so anxious,’ told The Times that they wanted to talk about their work with Kirk in order to prove that they had only facilitated the purchases and takeovers of lesser-known Twitter addresses early in the day. They said they had not continued to work with Kirk once he began more high-profile attacks around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.

‘lol’ did not confirm his real-world identity, but said he lived on the West Coast and was in his 20s. “ever so anxious” said he was 19 and lived in the south of England with his mother.

Kirk connected with “lol” late Tuesday and then “ever so anxious” on Discord early on Wednesday, and asked if they wanted to be his middlemen, selling Twitter accounts to the online underworld where they were known. They would take a cut from each transaction.”

Twice in the past year, the OGUsers forum was hacked, and both times its database of usernames, email addresses and private messages was leaked online. A review of the private messages for “lol” on OGUsers provides a glimpse into the vibrant market for the resale of prized OG accounts.

On OGUsers, lol was known to other members as someone who had a direct connection to one or more people working at Twitter who could be used to help fellow members gain access to Twitter profiles, including those that had been suspended for one reason or another. In fact, this was how lol introduced himself to the OGUsers community when he first joined.

“I have a twitter contact who I can get users from (to an extent) and I believe I can get verification from,” lol explained.

In a direct message exchange on OGUsers from November 2019, lol is asked for help from another OGUser member whose Twitter account had been suspended for abuse.

“hello saw u talking about a twitter rep could you please ask if she would be able to help unsus [unsuspend] my main and my friends business account will pay 800-1k for each,” the OGUusers profile inquires of lol.

Lol says he can’t promise anything but will look into it. “I sent her that, not sure if I will get a reply today bc its the weekend but ill let u know,” Lol says.

In another exchange, an OGUser denizen quizzes lol about his Twitter hookup.

“Does she charge for escalations? And how do you know her/what is her department/job. How do you connect with them if I may ask?”

“They are in the Client success team,” lol replies. “No they don’t charge, and I know them through a connection.”

As for how he got access to the Twitter employee, lol declines to elaborate, saying it’s a private method. “It’s a lil method, sorry I cant say.”

In another direct message, lol asks a fellow OGUser member to edit a comment in a forum discussion which included the Twitter account “@tankska,” saying it was his IRL (in real life) Twitter account and that he didn’t want to risk it getting found out or suspended (Twitter says this account doesn’t exist, but a simple text search on Twitter shows the profile was active until late 2019).

“can u edit that comment out, @tankska is a gaming twitter of mine and i dont want it to be on ogu :D’,” lol wrote. “just dont want my irl getting sus[pended].”

Still another OGUser member would post lol’s identifying information into a forum thread, calling lol by his first name — “Josh” — in a post asking lol what he might offer in an auction for a specific OG name.

“Put me down for 100, but don’t note my name in the thread please,” lol wrote.

WHO IS LOL?

The information in lol’s OGUsers registration profile indicates he was probably being truthful with The Times about his location. The hacked forum database shows a user “tankska” registered on OGUsers back in July 2018, but only made one post asking about the price of an older Twitter account for sale.

The person who registered the tankska account on OGUsers did so with the email address jperry94526@gmail.com, and from an Internet address tied to the San Ramon Unified School District in Danville, Calif.

According to 4iq.com, a service that indexes account details like usernames and passwords exposed in Web site data breaches, the jperry94526 email address was used to register accounts at several other sites over the years, including one at the apparel store Stockx.com under the profile name Josh Perry.

Tankska was active only briefly on OGUsers, but the hacked OGUsers database shows that “lol” changed his username three times over the years. Initially, it was “freej0sh,” followed by just “j0sh.”

lol did not respond to requests for comment sent to email addresses tied to his various OGU profiles and Instagram accounts.

ALWAYS IN DISCORD

Last week’s story on the Twitter compromise noted that just before the bitcoin scam tweets went out, several OG usernames changed hands. The story traced screenshots of Twitter tools posted online back to a moniker that is well-known in the OGUsers circle: PlugWalkJoe, a 21-year-old from the United Kingdom.

Speaking with The Times, PlugWalkJoe — whose real name is Joseph O’Connor — said while he acquired a single OG Twitter account (@6) through one of the hackers in direct communication with Kirk, he was otherwise not involved in the conversation.

“I don’t care,” O’Connor told The Times. “They can come arrest me. I would laugh at them. I haven’t done anything.”

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, O’Connor likewise asserted his innocence, suggesting at least a half dozen other hacker handles that may have been Kirk or someone who worked with Kirk on July 15, including “Voku,” “Crim/Criminal,” “Promo,” and “Aqua.”

“That twit screenshot was the first time in a while I joke[d], and evidently I shouldn’t have,” he said. “Joking is what got me into this mess.”

O’Connor shared a number of screenshots from a Discord chat conversation on the day of the Twitter hack between Kirk and two others: “Alive,” which is another handle used by lol, and “Ever So Anxious.” Both were described by The Times as middlemen who sought to resell OG Twitter names obtained from Kirk. O’Connor is referenced in these screenshots as both “PWJ” and by his Discord handle, “Beyond Insane.”

Ever So Anxious told Kirk his OGU nickname was “Chaewon,” which corresponds to a user in the United Kingdom. Just prior to the Twitter compromise, Chaewon advertised a service on the forum that could change the email address tied to any Twitter account for around $250 worth of bitcoin. O’Connor said Chaewon also operates under the hacker alias “Mason.”

At one point in the conversation, Kirk tells Alive and Ever So Anxious to send funds for any OG usernames they want to this bitcoin address. The payment history of that address shows that it indeed also received approximately $180,000 worth of bitcoin from the wallet address tied to the scam messages tweeted out on July 15 by the compromised celebrity accounts.

SWIMPING

My July 15 story observed there were strong indications that the people involved in the Twitter hack have connections to 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.

SIM swapping was thought to be behind the hijacking of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey‘s Twitter account last year. As recounted by Wired.com, @jack was hijacked after the attackers conducted a SIM swap attack against AT&T, the mobile provider for the phone number tied to Dorsey’s Twitter account.

Immediately after Jack Dorsey’s Twitter handle was hijacked, the hackers tweeted out several shout-outs, including one to @PlugWalkJoe. O’Connor told KrebsOnSecurity he has never been involved in SIM swapping, although that statement was contradicted by two law enforcement sources who closely track such crimes.

However, Chaewon’s private messages on OGusers indicate that he very much was involved in SIM swapping. Use of the term “SIM swapping” was not allowed on OGusers, and the forum administrators created an automated script that would watch for anyone trying to post the term into a private message or discussion thread.

The script would replace the term with “I do not condone illegal activities.” Hence, a portmanteau was sometimes used: “Swimping.”

“Are you still swimping?” one OGUser member asks of Chaewon on Mar. 24, 2020. “If so and got targs lmk your discord.” Chaewon responds in the affirmative, and asks the other user to share his account name on Wickr, an encrypted online messaging app that automatically deletes messages after a few days.

Chaewon/Ever So Anxious/Mason did not respond to requests for comment.

O’Connor told KrebsOnSecurity that one of the individuals thought to be associated with the July 15 Twitter hack — a young man who goes by the nickname “Voku” — is still actively involved in SIM-swapping, particularly against customers of AT&T and Verizon.

Voku is one of several hacker handles used by a Canton, Mich. youth whose mom turned him in to the local police in February 2018 when she overheard him talking on the phone and pretending to be an AT&T employee. Officers responding to the report searched the residence and found multiple cell phones and SIM cards, as well as files on the kid’s computer that included “an extensive list of names and phone numbers of people from around the world.”

The following month, Michigan authorities found the same individual accessing personal consumer data via public Wi-Fi at a local library, and seized 45 SIM cards, a laptop and a Trezor wallet — a hardware device designed to store crytpocurrency account data. In April 2018, Voku’s mom again called the cops on her son — identified only as confidential source #1 (“CS1”) in the criminal complaint against him — saying he’d obtained yet another mobile phone.

Voku’s cooperation with authorities led them to bust up a conspiracy involving at least nine individuals who stole millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency and other items of value from their targets.

CONSPIRACY

Samy Tarazi, an investigator with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, has spent hundreds of hours tracking young hackers during his tenure with REACT, a task force set up to combat SIM swapping and bring SIM swappers to justice.

According to Tarazi, multiple actors in the cybercrime underground are constantly targeting people who work in key roles at major social media and online gaming platforms, from Twitter and Instagram to Sony, Playstation and Xbox.

Tarazi said some people engaged in this activity seek to woo their targets, sometimes offering them bribes in exchange for the occasional request to unban or change the ownership of specific accounts.

All too often, however, employees at these social media and gaming platforms find themselves the object of extremely hostile and persistent personal attacks that threaten them and their families unless and until they give in to demands.

“In some cases, they’re just hitting up employees saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a business opportunity for you, do you want to make some money?'” Tarazi explained. “In other cases, they’ve done everything from SIM swapping and swatting the victim many times to posting their personal details online or extorting the victims to give up access.”

Allison Nixon is chief research officer at Unit 221B, a cyber investigations company based in New York. Nixon says she doesn’t buy the idea that PlugWalkJoe, lol, and Ever So Anxious are somehow less culpable in the Twitter compromise, even if their claims of not being involved in the July 15 Twitter bitcoin scam are accurate.

“You have the hackers like Kirk who can get the goods, and the money people who can help them profit — the buyers and the resellers,” Nixon said. “Without the buyers and the resellers, there is no incentive to hack into all these social media and gaming companies.”

Mark Rasch, Unit 221B’s general counsel and a former U.S. federal prosecutor, said all of the players involved in the Twitter compromise of July 15 can be charged with conspiracy, a legal concept in the criminal statute which holds that any co-conspirators are liable for the acts of any other co-conspirator in furtherance of the crime, even if they don’t know who those other people are in real life or what else they may have been doing at the time.

“Conspiracy has been called the prosecutor’s friend because it makes the agreement the crime,” Rasch said. “It’s a separate crime in addition to the underlying crime, whether it be breaking in to a network, data theft or account takeover. The ‘I just bought some usernames and gave or sold them to someone else’ excuse is wrong because it’s a conspiracy and these people obviously don’t realize that.”

In a statement on its ongoing investigation into the July 15 incident, Twitter said it resulted from a small number of employees being manipulated through a social engineering scheme. Twitter said at least 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers, who succeeded in sending out unauthorized tweets from 45 of them and may have been able to view additional information about those accounts, such as direct messages.

On eight of the compromised accounts, Twitter said, the attackers managed to download the account history using the Your Twitter Data tool. Twitter added that it is working with law enforcement and is rolling out additional company-wide training to guard against social engineering tactics.

Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter administrative tools. This post is an attempt to lay out some of the timeline of this attack, and point to clues about who may have been behind it.

The first public signs of the intrusion came around 3 PM EST, when the Twitter account for the cryptocurrency exchange Binance tweeted a message saying it had partnered with “CryptoForHealth” to give back 5000 bitcoin to the community, with a link where people could donate or send money.

Minutes after that, similar tweets went out from the accounts of other cryptocurrency exchanges, and from the Twitter accounts for democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, President Barak Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and investment mogul Warren Buffet.

While it may sound ridiculous that anyone would be fooled into sending bitcoin in response to these tweets, an analysis of the BTC wallet promoted by many of the hacked Twitter profiles shows that on July 15 the account processed 383 transactions and received almost 13 bitcoin on July 15 — or approximately USD $117,000.

Twitter issued a statement saying it detected “a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools. We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.”

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 account names (such as @B or @joe). Possession of these OG accounts confers a measure of status and perceived influence and wealth in SIM 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 OGusers — a forum dedicated to account hijacking — a user named “Chaewon” advertised they could change email address tied to any Twitter account for $250, and provide direct access to accounts for between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece.

“This is NOT a method, you will be given a full refund if for any reason you aren’t given the email/@, however if it is revered/suspended I will not be held accountable,” Chaewon wrote in their sales thread, which was titled “Pulling email for any Twitter/Taking Requests.”

Hours before any of the Twitter accounts for cryptocurrency platforms or public figures began blasting out bitcoin scams on Wednesday, the attackers appear to have focused their attention on hijacking a handful of OG accounts, including “@6.”

That Twitter account was formerly owned by Adrian Lamo — the now-deceased “homeless hacker” perhaps best known for breaking into the New York Times’s network and for reporting Chelsea Manning‘s theft of classified documents. @6 is now controlled by Lamo’s longtime friend, a security researcher and phone phreaker who asked to be identified in this story only by his Twitter nickname, “Lucky225.”

Lucky225 said that just before 2 p.m. EST on Wednesday, he received a password reset confirmation code via Google Voice for the @6 Twitter account. Lucky said he’d previously disabled SMS notifications via his Google Voice number as a means of receiving multi-factor codes from Twitter, opting instead to have one-time codes generated by a mobile authentication app.

But because the attackers were able to change the email address tied to the @6 account and disable multi-factor authentication, the one-time authentication code was sent to both his Google Voice account and to the new email address added by the attackers.

“The way the attack worked was that within Twitter’s admin tools, apparently you can update the email address of any Twitter user, and it does this without sending any kind of notification to the user,” Lucky told KrebsOnSecurity. “So [the attackers] could avoid detection by updating the email address on the account first, and then turning off 2FA.”

Lucky said he still hasn’t been able to review whether any tweets were sent from his account during the time it was hijacked because he still doesn’t have access to it (he has put together a breakdown of the entire episode at this Medium post).

But around the same time @6 was hijacked, another OG account – @B — was swiped. The person in control of that account then began tweeting out pictures of Twitter’s internal tools panel.

Twitter responded by removing any tweets across its platform that included screenshots of its internal tools, and in some cases temporarily suspended the ability of those accounts to tweet further.

Another Twitter account — @shinji — also was tweeting out screenshots of Twitters internal tools. Minutes before Twitter terminated the @shinji account, it was seen publishing a tweet saying “follow @6,” referring to the account hijacked from Lucky225.

Cached copies of @Shinji’s tweets prior to Wednesday’s attack on Twitter are available here and here from the Internet Archive. Those caches show Shinji claims ownership of two OG accounts on Instagram — “j0e” and “dead.”

KrebsOnSecurity heard from a source who works in security at one of the largest U.S.-based mobile carriers, who said the “j0e” and “dead” Instagram accounts are tied to a notorious SIM swapper who goes by the nickname “PlugWalkJoe.” Investigators have been tracking PlugWalkJoe because he is thought to have been involved in multiple SIM swapping attacks over the years that preceded high-dollar bitcoin heists.

Now look at the profile image in the other Archive.org index of the @shinji Twitter account (pictured below). It is the same image as the one included in the @Shinji screenshot above from Wednesday in which Joseph/@Shinji was tweeting out pictures of Twitter’s internal tools.

This individual, the source said, was a key participant in a group of SIM swappers that adopted the nickname “ChucklingSquad,” and was thought to be behind the hijacking of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey‘s Twitter account last year. As Wired.com recounted, @jack was hijacked after the attackers conducted a SIM swap attack against AT&T, the mobile provider for the phone number tied to Dorsey’s Twitter account.

The mobile industry security source told KrebsOnSecurity that PlugWalkJoe in real life is a 21-year-old from Liverpool, U.K. named Joseph James Connor. The source said PlugWalkJoe is in Spain where he was attending a university until earlier this year. He added that PlugWalkJoe has been unable to return home on account of travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The mobile industry source said PlugWalkJoe was the subject of an investigation in which a female investigator was hired to strike up a conversation with PlugWalkJoe and convince him to agree to a video chat. The source further explained that a video which they recorded of that chat showed a distinctive swimming pool in the background.

According to that same source, the pool pictured on PlugWalkJoe’s Instagram account (instagram.com/j0e) is the same one they saw in their video chat with him.

If PlugWalkJoe was in fact pivotal to this Twitter compromise, it’s perhaps fitting that he was identified in part via social engineering. Maybe we should all be grateful the perpetrators of this attack on Twitter did not set their sights on more ambitious aims, such as disrupting an election or the stock market, or attempting to start a war by issuing false, inflammatory tweets from world leaders.

Also, it seems clear that this Twitter hack could have let the attackers view the direct messages of anyone on Twitter, information that is difficult to put a price on but which nevertheless would be of great interest to a variety of parties, from nation states to corporate spies and blackmailers.

This is a fast-moving story. Please stay tuned for further updates.

Microsoft today released updates to plug a whopping 123 security holes in Windows and related software, including fixes for a critical, “wormable” flaw in Windows Server versions that Microsoft says is likely to be exploited soon. While this particular weakness mainly affects enterprises, July’s care package from Redmond has a little something for everyone. So if you’re a Windows (ab)user, it’s time once again to back up and patch up (preferably in that order).

Top of the heap this month in terms of outright scariness is CVE-2020-1350, which concerns a remotely exploitable bug in more or less all versions of Windows Server that attackers could use to install malicious software simply by sending a specially crafted DNS request.

Microsoft said it is not aware of reports that anyone is exploiting the weakness (yet), but the flaw has been assigned a CVSS score of 10, which translates to “easy to attack” and “likely to be exploited.”

“We consider this to be a wormable vulnerability, meaning that it has the potential to spread via malware between vulnerable computers without user interaction,” Microsoft wrote in its documentation of CVE-2020-1350. “DNS is a foundational networking component and commonly installed on Domain Controllers, so a compromise could lead to significant service interruptions and the compromise of high level domain accounts.”

CVE-2020-1350 is just the latest worry for enterprise system administrators in charge of patching dangerous bugs in widely-used software. Over the past couple of weeks, fixes for flaws with high severity ratings have been released for a broad array of software products typically used by businesses, including Citrix, F5, Juniper, Oracle and SAP. This at a time when many organizations are already short-staffed and dealing with employees working remotely thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Windows Server isn’t the only nasty one addressed this month that malware or malcontents can use to break into systems without any help from users. A full 17 other critical flaws fixed in this release tackle security weaknesses that Microsoft assigned its most dire “critical” rating, such as in Office, Internet Exploder, SharePoint, Visual Studio, and Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

Some of the more eyebrow-raising critical bugs addressed this month include CVE-2020-1410, which according to Recorded Future concerns the Windows Address Book and could be exploited via a malicious vcard file. Then there’s CVE-2020-1421, which protects against potentially malicious .LNK files (think Stuxnet) that could be exploited via an infected removable drive or remote share. And we have the dynamic duo of CVE-2020-1435 and CVE-2020-1436, which involve problems with the way Windows handles images and fonts that could both be exploited to install malware just by getting a user to click a booby-trapped link or document.

Not to say flaws rated “important” as opposed to critical aren’t also a concern. Chief among those is CVE-2020-1463, a problem within Windows 10 and Server 2016 or later that was detailed publicly prior to this month’s Patch Tuesday.

Before you update with this month’s patch batch, please make sure you have backed up your system and/or important files. It’s not uncommon for a particular Windows update to hose one’s system or prevent it from booting properly, and some updates even have been known to erase or corrupt files. Last month’s bundle of joy from Microsoft sent my Windows 10 system into a perpetual crash state. Thankfully, I was able to restore from a recent backup.

So do yourself a favor and backup before installing any patches. Windows 10 even has some built-in tools to help you do that, either on a per-file/folder basis or by making a complete and bootable copy of your hard drive all at once.

Also, keep in mind that Windows 10 is set to apply patches on its own schedule, which means if you delay backing up you could be in for a wild ride. If you wish to ensure the operating system has been set to pause updating so you can back up your files and/or system before the operating system decides to reboot and install patches whenever it sees fit, see this guide.

As always, if you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please consider leaving a comment about it below; there’s a better-than-even chance other readers have experienced the same and may chime in here with some helpful tips. Also, keep an eye on the AskWoody blog from Woody Leonhard, who keeps a reliable lookout for buggy Microsoft updates each month.