Someone from Twitter is a Twit
Posted on | July 17, 2009 | View Comments
This past week, Twitter had a breach of security when a top executives email account was compromised. Many of the documents leaked were stored on Google Apps, which has raised a great deal of commotion about the security of working with internet based applications. The real fact here is that a secure service, can ALWAYS be crippled by an easy to crack password. Brute force attacks have been out for years, if not at least a decade at this point. The hype about the security and vulnerability of people using internet based apps is apauling to me. A company can spend millions of dollars on security, but at the end of the day if their password is their dogs name for EVERY LOGIN they use than what good is it? My point here is that the media, and I point this strictly at the mainstream networks, does a great job of scaring the general public out of moving to new technologies. They should be banned from using the term ‘hack’. I never knew that cracking a password that was under 5 characters could be refered to as hacking. I’ve probably had 5 or 6 people come to me this week and express how nervous the situation made them, and that they have a twitter or facebook account they want to shut down now because they are worried about intrusion. Here is the simple fact, use secure passwords and don’t post sensitive info on your public site (especially things that relate to your password). Seems like it would be common sense but nothing can be taken for granted apparently.
The material that was leaked is rather intersesting if you don’t have much else to read about, topics including marketing info, competitor strategy, and the idea of how they can charge for the service. Check it out here at TechCrunch, the site that was given all the leaked information.