It’s said and done now, but really, shame on Twitter. These are just some painfully obvious and blatant information assurance mistakes. And to consider these security errors occurred on a massive lifestreaming site such as Twitter. Unthinkable.
According to the FTC’s complaint, Twitter was vulnerable to these attacks because it failed to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system, including:
requiring employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that are not used for other programs, websites, or networks; prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts; suspending or disabling administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts; providing an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users; enforcing periodic changes of administrative passwords by, for example, setting them to expire every 90 days; restricting access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it; and imposing other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses.
It’s easy to overlook information security basics such as what the FTC found Twitter had done. But seriously, these steps listed above are not that painstaking to take care of. This should be a lesson-learned for all folks attached to the IT industry.
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