I’m guessing DMs were the real loot. The public display with the BTC diversion validates any DMs that were stolen. Otherwise blackmail targets could deny them.
They potentially had access to any account they wanted. You don't know that they weren't snarfing DMs on interesting accounts while having the celeb accounts panhandle for bitcoin after.
You'd be surprised. Some celebrities might engage in salacious activities via DM but even the most boring corporation can have lots of customer information in support chats.
Or they were but it was kept secret. Twitter hasn't published a list, we only know of the BTC tweets. Maybe they actually were after other accounts' DMs and the tweets are just diversion to make it seem like an undirected attack.
Unless we hear from account holders that their credentials weren't stolen, there's no reason to believe that only those were hacked that sent tweets.
Except that is all the evidence we have to go on for this conversation. Verified fake tweets have been sent from prominent democrats, and not from any prominent republicans.
Of course you're right that we don't know is if this is political, or just a distraction from whatever their real goal is / was. But the optics are clear here, and there is no reason to muddy the waters.
They needed to reset credentials so this could've never been a stealth attack. By making it public, any later leak of DMs is much more likely to be accepted as authentic. Without that, most people would've doubted the authenticity of leaked material.
Precisely. And who's to say which leaked DMs are real and which ones are faked? If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I recommend the book Active Measures.
Perhaps it is a form of proof that they actually have access to the accounts and thus the DMs. Just posting claimed DMs that can be deleted and denied has a lower probability of being believed.
Interesting theory, but then why would they include Apple? Among others in the list, they’re almost guaranteed to be of no value and only increase the risk.