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05.06.09
Twitter Had Its Admin Infrastructure Cracked Causing Alarm For Social Networking
 By
Dan Morrill
Nothing says "going to have a bad day" than to have someone crack open the admin panel to one of the hottest social networking properties out there. But Twitter has had at least one of their admin accounts cracked, with pictures both on Mashable and Korben.
The bad part is that Twitter had its admin infrastructure cracked, but this should be ringing alarm bells across the social networking sphere. Information security is just as important in social networking as it is in any other online pursuit that people will engage in. The problem is further highlighted in that if I can download the few million e-mail addresses, websites, and other information that is often directly associated with people's data, then the ability to target people becomes so much easier. This just makes finding people and spear phishing that much easier, which is one of the bigger drawbacks when someone hacks a social networking system.
It might be cool to look at, and the admin interface is indeed interesting, but from the viewpoint of people who will end up cleaning up the mess at twitter, the unknown number of people who have had their information downloaded, and the unknown amount of time this was available to the people who did this you could pretty much assume that the entire user base at twitter has been at the very least copied off somewhere, and is in hacker data exchange channels. Not a good day for twitter, or for the systems users.
Twitter has been hit with worms, and a whole host of other malware. You are seeing spammers and ethically challenged marketers using the system to push whatever product works (the lastest is swine flu medications) in the here and now. This is a detractor from the user experience, and something that anyone using a social networking system, or businesses that rely on these systems should be seriously putting in as part of their disaster recovery plans. Hacking systems are good enough that they could impersonate anyone, if you got an e-mail from a company, you might or might not click on it, but if you got a tweet from a company, you might just go follow the link.
User training is going to have to step up, even if they say you are their friend, it might not be healthy for your computer to click on links in twitter for a while.
Comments
About the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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