"A hacker calling himself Hacker Croll broke into an administrative employee’s e-mail account and gained access to the employee’s Google Apps account, where Twitter shares spreadsheets and documents with business ideas and financial details, said Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder. The hacker then sent documents about company plans and finances, confidential contracts, and job applicants to two tech news blogs, TechCrunch, in Silicon Valley, and Korben, in France. There was also personal information about Twitter employees including credit card numbers. The hacker also broke into the e-mail account of the wife of Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, and from there accessed several of Mr. Williams’ personal Internet accounts, including those at Amazon and PayPal, Mr. Stone said. TechCrunch revealed documents showing that Twitter, a private company that so far has no revenue, projected that it will reach a billion users and $1.54 billion in revenue by 2013. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch’s founder, said in an interview that the hacker had also sent him detailed strategy documents about potential business models, the competitive threat from Facebook and when the company might be acquired."
Password Proliferation Equals Business Data Vulnerability
Passwords are an important part of the world we live in today. Everything from our e-mail account(s) to our online banking and business database point of entry are password protected. This has caused many of us to use the same password time and time again (in the hopes that we don’t show our true age, and forget what our password was for a particular website). On Wednesday, July 15, 2009, The New York Times reported that a hacker had hacked into an employee of Twitter’s e-mail account and exposed corporate information about the company.
The article went on to state that this situation is more about us as individuals and the need to have good "strong passwords", as opposed to any security flaws with Google Apps. All the hacker did was correctly answer the personal questions that were asked of the User by Gmail. Similarly, this is how hackers gained access to Sarah Palin’s e-mail account on Yahoo, back during the election of 2008. Much of what we say about ourselves, for better or worse, is online these days, and the details of what your dog’s name is, where you met your sweetheart, etc. Therefore, it would seem rather easy for anyone to gain access to a personal e-mail account. Which is exactly what the hacker intended. In a letter to Korben, the hacker said that the purpose of doing what he/she did was to highlight the fact that no one is safe on the Net.
Mission Accomplished.
To read the entire article, please click here: Twitter Hack Raises Flags On Security