Lessons From Twitter's Security Breach

[Peaches]

July 15, 2009 12:45 PM PDT

Lessons from Twitter's security breach

by Josh Lowensohn

and Caroline McCarthy

Twitter's latest security hole has less to do with its users than it does with its staff, but lessons can be learned on both sides.

In the case of Jason Goldman, who is currently Twitter's director of product management, the simplicity of Yahoo's password recovery system was enough to let a hacker get in and gain information from a number of other sites, including access to other Twitter staff's personal accounts.

The aftermath of the hack, which took place in May, is just now coming to fruition. Documents that a hacker by the alias of Hacker Croll recovered from Goldman's account and others (including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams) could be a treasure trove of inside information about the company and its plans.

While Croll was planning to release the entire batch publicly (and at once), tech blog TechCrunch posted news late Tuesday that it had received them and was considering posting the details of at least some of them.

Although it seems that Twitter has been thrust into this situation a bit unfairly, a hack along these lines could have happened to the executives of more Web companies than anybody would like to admit. What it really highlights is the extreme interconnectedness of the social Web: with the likes of e-mail contact importing and data-portability services like Facebook Connect now commonplace, a savvy hacker can have access to multiple accounts simply by accessing one.

cnet - http://news.cnet.com/security/