Intellectual Property Law

Twitter Breached Again

By Kim Zetter

A French hacker has posted screenshots backing claims that he breached Twitter’s administrative panel, threatening the security and integrity of high-profile accounts and exposing private information to the public, such as the account holder’s e-mail address, IP address, mobile phone number in some cases and list of accounts blocked by the user.

The screen shots show internal settings and information for Twitter accounts belonging to U.S President Barack Obama, actor Ashton Kutcher, and singers Lily Allen and Britney Spears. The info reveals that the Obama account has blocked more than 90 users from sending it messages. The screen shots also revealed a list of users who have been blacklisted by Twitter.

Twitter confirmed the intrusion and said that only ten accounts had been compromised and that no information in the accounts had been altered.

Unlike an attack earlier this year when a hacker gained access to a Twitter administrator’s account by using a password cracker to guess her log-in credential, the French hacker, who goes by the handle “Hacker Croll” gained access by breaching a Twitter administrator’s Yahoo e-mail account, where he found an e-mail from Twitter that disclosed the administrator’s Twitter password. To gain access to the Yahoo account, the hacker simply reset the password to the account by answering the secret question. Croll doesn’t say what the secret question was.

Unlike the previous Twitter hack attack, Croll didn’t send out phony messages from the compromised accounts.

In other news, the Pentagon discussed this week how it uses Twitter to seek out recruits and spread the military’s message.

Full post as published by Threat Level on May 01, 2009 (boomark / email).