Twittergate: Update 3

Twittergate Reveals E-Mail is Bigger Security Risk than Twitter

First, everyone needs to calm down. Twitter.com itself was not breached. According to Evan Williams as quoted in a TechCrunch article, the attack did not breach Twitter.com or its administrative functions, nor were user accounts affected in any way. So everyone can just stop with the “Twitter needs to revamp its security!” and “Twitter isn’t secure” headlines and articles because it’s not only blatantly wrong, it’s diverting attention that should be devoted to the real problem: e-mail and account self-service.

What was compromised remains somewhat of a mystery. Following through the TechCrunch article to a blog on the same subject reveals some interesting details, however. A screen shot of what appears to be an internal memo to Twitter employees requires a change in passwords (along with instructions on improving the strength of said passwords) but mentions the password to be changed is the password you use to login to internal sites. From this one might infer that a breach was perpetrated through an intra/extranet, as opposed to twitter’s core infrastructure. Regardless, the breach of Twitter was only ancillary to the real security risk: the access to e-mail. That’s where the real meaty data was obtained; not from Twitter or its internal systems.

In this case, it was GMail access that enabled the miscreant to use password recovery techniques (“Forgot your password?”) to gain access to other related information and sites: personal credit cards, GoDaddy registrar accounts, etc… Did the attacker really need to breach Twitter’s internal applications to get that information? Probably not. Certainly gaining access to Twitter’s internal applications made accessing employees’ GMail accounts that much easier, but it likely wasn’t necessary except as a means to garner attentiongmail-logo which was, the miscreant claims, the intent of the attack. The danger of a GMail breach is that Google is very integrated across applications, so gaining access to one often makes it a no-brainer to gain access to others.