Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accounts Hacked

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by seldo on Monday January 05, 2009 @02:06PM (#420889)

Jokes aside, this is a huge deal for Twitter. Unless they can prove that these guys did something like get phished, their professed monetization strategy of corporate twitter accounts could run into real trouble.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by tlrobinson on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @01:04AM (#421662)

They weren't phished, Twitter's admin tools were hacked: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/monday-morning-madness.html

Ouch, not exactly confidence inspiring. It's also sort of ironic that one of the headlines under "Twitter is Del.icio.us" is "Governments use Twitter for Emergency Alerts, Traffic Notices and More - Government Technology"

Imagine the havoc that would ensue if a large number of people were following some government's emergency alerts on Twitter and someone were able to gain control. It would be pretty easy to incite panic.

Or if the attacker didn't like a politician, like Obama, he could post subtly offensive comments as the politician.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by biohacker42 on Monday January 05, 2009 @03:28PM (#421045)

Corporate for pay twittering does not immediately strike me as a profitable business, is it just me?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by palish on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @06:22AM (#421832)

Neither did online search in 1999.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by mtw on Monday January 05, 2009 @03:05PM (#420995)

it strikes me that twitter has acute technology problems. Remember the scalability problems last year? now this security issue. Friendfeed in contrast, has none of these issues.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by johns on Monday January 05, 2009 @03:32PM (#421056)

FriendFeed has none of the issues and does not have the critical mass to draw the sort of high-profile attention the defacers were seeking. Given enough scale, FriendFeed will have its share of issues.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by biohacker42 on Monday January 05, 2009 @04:49PM (#421191)

I can believe the "True geometric growth is hard to deal with period." argument when it comes to downtime.

But what does scale have to do with security?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by wmf on Monday January 05, 2009 @04:57PM (#421199)

More users -> more attackers -> more holes found.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by Herring on Monday January 05, 2009 @06:33PM (#421320)

Attackers can only find holes that are there to begin with.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by wmf on Monday January 05, 2009 @07:06PM (#421359)

There are always holes.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by Herring on Monday January 05, 2009 @07:51PM (#421403)

Some architectures are more resistant than others. I suppose you could break into some air gapped military computers -- if you had a nuke.

why are we even discussing this?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by sanswork on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @01:27AM (#421682)

Or someone on your payroll on the inside.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by Herring on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @09:06AM (#421919)

Well that's universal. You can't exactly protect against someone who's also supposed to hold the keys to the system. Its more a feature than a bug.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Twitter Security Collapses; Obama, Fox and Britney Accoun... by alaskamiller on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @04:13AM (#421777)

It's like saying Macs don't have a virus problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]