A Diamond Model Analysis on Twitter's Biggest Hack

TL;DR

This paper uses the diamond model to analyze the 2020 Twitter account hijacking, providing insights into the attack's infrastructure, motivations, and impact to improve cybersecurity defenses.

Contribution

It applies the diamond model to a high-profile cyberattack case study, offering a structured analysis of the attack's components and implications.

Findings

Mapped attacker, capability, infrastructure, and victim using the diamond model

Provided a comprehensive analysis of the attack's impact on cybersecurity policy

Enhanced understanding of attack vectors and motivations in social media breaches

Abstract

Cyberattacks have prominently increased over the past few years now, and have targeted actors from a wide variety of domains. Understanding the motivation, infrastructure, attack vectors, etc. behind such attacks is vital to proactively work against preventing such attacks in the future and also to analyze the economic and social impact of such attacks. In this paper, we leverage the diamond model to perform an intrusion analysis case study of the 2020 Twitter account hijacking Cyberattack. We follow this standardized incident response model to map the adversary, capability, infrastructure, and victim and perform a comprehensive analysis of the attack, and the impact posed by the attack from a Cybersecurity policy standpoint.