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Tech Junk

Twitter’s security breach

Not sure if any of you have followed the recent breach of Twitter. For me, it hit close to home, as my Gmail account was compromised not too long ago and from reading the article below it might provide an explanation of how my account got breached as well. As many others, I too get lazy and used the same username/password for many of my online accounts.

The Twitter document leak fiasco started with a simple story that personal accounts of Twitter employees were hacked. Twitter CEO Evan Williams commented on that story, saying that Twitter itself was mostly unaffected. No personal accounts were compromised, and “most of the sensitive information was personal rather than company-related,” he said. The individual behind the attacks, known as Hacker Croll, wasn’t happy with that response. Lots of Twitter corporate information was compromised, and he wanted the world to know about it. So he sent us all of the documents that he obtained, some 310 of them, and the story developed from there.

It’s clear that Twitter was completely unaware of how deeply they were affected as a company – when Williams said that most of the information wasn’t company related he believed it. It wasn’t until later that he realized just how much and what kind of information was taken. It included things like financial projections and executive meeting notes that contained highly confidential information.

More here.

It’s a lengthy article, but a very interesting read, as it describes how “easy” it to gain access and hijack most online accounts.