Security News
Twitter announced this week that it's taking steps to protect high-profile accounts during the upcoming election in the United States. Twitter is reaching out, via an in-app notification, to the owners of accounts associated with government officials, presidential campaigns, political parties, candidates, major news outlets and political journalists.
A "Female social network" called Giggle whose operators left its user database unsecured has triggered a wave of Twitter controversy after its founder threatened to sue a UK infosec firm who pointed out the vulnerability. Even for those who stay the hell away from Twitter there are potentially some lessons to be learnt from the Giggle debacle about responsible disclosure as well as operating an app that collects and stores users' data.
Three "Grumpy old hackers" in the Netherlands managed to access Donald Trump's Twitter account in 2016 by extracting his password from the 2012 Linkedin hack. The pseudonymous, middle-aged chaps, named only as Edwin, Mattijs and Victor, told reporters they had lifted Trump's particulars from a database that was being passed about hackers, and tried it on his account.
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.
European Union privacy regulators are wrangling over the penalty Ireland's data privacy watchdog was set to issue Twitter for a data breach, pushing back the case's long awaited conclusion under the bloc's tough new data privacy rules. The Irish Data Privacy Commission was expected to issue its decision in the Twitter case, which would be its first involving a U.S. technology company since the new privacy law, known as GDPR, took effect in 2018, allowing for hefty fines.
The phishing attack on Twitter employees serves as an opportunity for all businesses to reassess how they build and deploy application
The Twitter move affects media "Where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution," the company said in a statement. "Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor."
One of the alleged Twitter hackers faced a bail hearing in a Florida court yesterday. With few or no security options turned on for the meeting, it turned into an eye-watering experience as one or more killjoys hijacked the Zoom session by sharing their own screens and bombarbing the other participants with heavy-duty pornography.
The British teenager accused of being part of the gang that hacked Twitter and posted a cryptocurrency scam from various US celebrities' accounts has not yet been arrested. Mason Sheppard, a 19-year-old of Bognor Regis in the English county of West Sussex, has been visited by the National Crime Agency but no arrests have been made on this side of the Atlantic.
Twitter informed customers on Wednesday that a vulnerability in its Android app could have been exploited by malicious applications to access private data. According to the social media giant, the flaw is related to a vulnerability that affects Android 8 and 9, which Google patched in October 2018.