To be precise TechCrunch has received 310 “confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and its employees” by an unknown hacker (“Hacker Croll”). Some documents are as detailed as the executive meeting notes, E-mails of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams (more info and his blog), partnership agreements and even financial projections and a lot more… TechCrunch says that it is not going to publish all the documents but will publish information “that is relevant to Twitter’s business, particularly product notes and financial projections”. From these confidential data we get a glimpse of Twitter’s own projections –
25 million users in 2009,
100 million in 2010,
350 million in 2011,
Finally becoming the first Internet service to reach one billion users!
How can a company like Twitter (more info) be so casual about its security? And what about the poor authentication policies used by Google? This is not the first time Twitter is attacked by hackers, earlier in May Biz Stone (more info and his blog)confirmed an attack and this time around Evan says
“Yes, we did suffer an attack a few weeks ago and are familiar with this list of stuff. This is unrelated to the hack of twitter where someone gained access to user’s accounts.”
How safe is your information on the cloud?
Update : Response of Twitter “Twitter, Even More Open Than We Wanted”
Follow-Up
TechCrunch : Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post by Michael Arrington
TechCrunch : Twitter’s @Ev Confirms Hacker Targeted Personal Accounts; Attack Was “Highly Distressing.” by Erick Schonfeld
TechCrunch : Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch by Michael Arrington
GIGAOM : Many Unknowns In Twitter Document Breach by Jordan Golson
PCWORLD : Hacker: I Broke Into Twitter by Robert McMillan
DigitalBeat : Twitter pillaged: Hacker accesses email of Twitter employees, and tells all by Matt Marshall
Mashable! : Twitter’s Security Meltdown by Stan Schroeder
Guardian : TechCrunch defends posting confidential documents garnered by Twitter hacker
French Blog having in in depth leaked content Korben : Hack de Twitter – La suite… by Korben and its conversion in English here
July 15th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
RT @TechDusts: Security Breach At Twitter, Is This Place Safe Any More? http://bit.ly/GUO8l (by mayank25may) #twitter #security
July 16th, 2009 at 2:24 am
Security Breach At Twitter; Twitter Plans To Be The 1st Internet Service To Reach 1 BILLION Users! http://bit.ly/GUO8l (by mayank25may)
July 16th, 2009 at 2:25 am
Security Breach At Twitter, Is This Place Safe Any More? http://bit.ly/GUO8l (by mayank25may) #twitter #hack #techcrunch #security
July 18th, 2009 at 3:16 am
[...] has published yet another set of sensational Twitter documents after the Twitter security breach scandal. Though Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has written “It’s important to note that we have [...]
July 24th, 2009 at 2:15 am
[...] month it specifically stated “choose wisely” because you cannot change it. After the Twitter documents leaked out we learned that even Twitter considers facebook as the biggest thread and that it fears that [...]
November 6th, 2009 at 1:45 am
[...] Old debate but – How safe is your data online? Earlier there have been issues with Twitter. Hacker broken in and gained access to user accounts. This one is even more disturbing. We share, [...]