Twitter Embarrassed by Cloud Hacker
;)
;)
Documents and information stolen from employee by hackers.
Cyber criminals have targeted social networking phenomenon Twitter in the latest round of corporate hacking.
Twitter revealed yesterday in its blog that one of their employees had been targeted by hackers and had her personal email broken into. Having gained access to the administrator’s personal email, the hacker was able to manipulate Google Apps in order to gain sensitive documents and information regarding Twitter.
Twitter said that the breach was not anything to do with a weakness in Google Apps: “This isn’t about any flaw in web apps, it speaks to the importance of following good personal security guidelines such as choosing strong passwords.”
Twitter also wanted to put users at ease, reassuring the vast Twitter community that no personal user accounts were compromised. “This was not a hack of the Twitter service, it was a personal attack followed by the theft of private company documents,” the blog stated.
Twitter tried to make light of the breach, borrowing eloquently from Peter Kafka, the hack was: “akin to having your underwear drawer rifled: Embarrassing, but no one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there”. The hacker, known online as Hacker Croll sent the confidential documents to a number of online news sources in order to profit from the precious information. TechCrunch confirmed that they had been sent a zip file with 310 documents concerning Twitter.
Although the hack won’t have any lasting damage for Twitter, it does raise the issue of cloud security in an increasingly online age. New methods of increased security mechanisms are currently being developed in order to combat future web break-ins.
