About 10 days ago, the news broke out specifying that Twitter was attacked by a hacker and sensitive information was taken out and published. Twitter denied it but now, it is public how the outage took place. The Hacker himself has done the honours to detail how he achieved this feat and the rationale behind it.
With this article, one can definitely learn that even the simplest of mistakes can be the cause of whole company crumbling down. Although, Twitter does not seem to get affected much on the business side but yes, it definitely puts a question mark on Twitter’s Security Policy.
Twitter is a micro blogging service and is hugely popular, so much so, that almost all the celebrities, From Barack Obama to Indian Movie Stars are hooked on to it. Everyone is typing out 140 characters of their personal or official information on twitter and is providing links to websites containing information.
The Hacker collected all the confidential information of twitter including project plans, financial projections, credit card information, call logs of twitter employees, people appearing for interviews et cetera. Now, this information is a like a gold mine for anyone.
The best part is that this attack on twitter has put even well established services like GMail, Hotmail, iTunes, AT & T softwares also in the line of fire. The twitter attack took place only after this hacker hacked the gmail account of one of twitter’s employee using “forgot password” option.
After reading this article, everyone should again think about password recovery policies, password formations and repeatitions, question the so called “secret question” for password recovery. This attack signifies that every piece of software/application/web service is vulnerable if the security aspect of itself is not in place.
This attack definitely started with Identity theft. and this leaves a lot more gap between the study and implementation of Identity Management concepts.
Read this article here The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack
…
Quote of the Day:"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization." - Morpheus