SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter, the social networking website that allows users to communicate with groups of people in 140 characters or less, announced that it has become the latest victim in a number of cyber-attacks against media companies. The company stated on its blog Friday that hackers may have gained access to the user data 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users.
As more consumers take to the internet and the Cloud to communicate, store data and transact business, internet security, and breaches, become more alarming. Twitter states that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users. Such data could be used to hack into other devices and accounts owned by the victims of the attack if the devices and accounts are in any way linked to the email addresses, passowords and user names stolen. But at least at Twitter, affected account are safe again, as the company has since reset compromised passwords and sent emails advising affected users.
This latest in a wave of cyber-crimes against big media comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.
The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks. “Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage Internet security,” the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. “The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities.”
Although Bob Lord, Twitter’s director of information security said in the blog that the attack “was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident.”
“The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked,” Lord said. “For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.”
One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee’s home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.
Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers “a toehold” in Twitter’s internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company’s system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users’ passwords.
In a telephone interview Friday, Soltani said that the relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren’t on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company’s servers.
Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.
That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist’s movements.
“More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service,” Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist’s emails.