Twitter Confidential Information Exposed After Twitter Administrator Accounts Breach
An unidentified hacker has exposed confidential corporate and personal information belonging to microblogging site Twitter and its employees after breaching electronic accounts belonging to several people close to the company.
The episode is the latest reminder that the convenience of cloud-based services that store spreadsheets and other information online cut both ways. While they make it easy to access personal notes from anywhere in the world, they also open up the information to theft – especially when the owners are highly public individuals who didn’t take due care to safeguard the data in the first place.
The breach occurred “about a month ago,” when an email account belonging to a Twitter admin was compromised. From there, the employee’s Google Docs, Calendars, and other Google Apps were also accessed, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote. Around the same time, a personal email account belonging to the wife of Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams was also compromised, exposing a variety of accounts belonging to the CEO, including Amazon and PayPal.
The breach is an embarrassment for Twitter for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the most recent example of employees at the highly visible company failing to adequately protect their accounts. (In January, accounts belonging to Britney Spears and other celebrities were compromised, and as Wired.com later reported, the weak link in the chain was an admin password set to “happiness”). What’s more, the breach is airing documents the privately held company surely prefers to keep private.
Twitter’s Stone compared the breach to having one’s underwear drawer publicly rifled through: “Embarrassing, but no one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there.”
Credit: The Register
More on CyberInsecure:
Posts
Leave a Reply
Comments with unsolicited links to other resources will be marked as spam. DO NOT leave links in comments. Please leave your real email, it wont be published.