Security News > 2020 > July > Industry Reactions to Twitter Hack: Feedback Friday
Several high-profile Twitter accounts were targeted recently in an attack that involved the hackers accessing internal Twitter systems and tools.
Twitter has only shared limited technical information about the attack, but some victims say the attackers hijacked their accounts by changing the associated email address and initiating the password reset process.
Twitter is big and important people have large amounts of followers there - but even Snapchat and Reddit have more users than Twitter.
"Even the most sophisticated technologists, like those at Twitter, often overlook the human component of cybersecurity. If you take a closer look, you'll find that this attack resembles the AWS breach that occurred back in 2019 by Paige Thompson. Although that was an actual manipulation and exploit of AWS services it was conducted because of unique knowledge of AWS in conjunction with opportunity. Similarly here Twitter employees had the ability to"take over" accounts using an admin panel.
"However, the larger issue as I see it is that Twitter had an administration panel providing immense access to Twitter accounts accessible via the internet. Access to this panel should have been IP restricted to known IP addresses, and monitored. This points directly to the need for improved behavioral analytics, specifically data exfiltration analytics, such as extreme rates that measure changes and acceleration of traffic from individual hosts and unusual day reporting to show when users are taking action at times they aren't typically online."