Twitter is in chaos.
The firm has kicked out hundreds of its engineers (in addition to hundreds of the contractors liable for battling misinformation and dangerous content material.)
Meanwhile Twitter’s CISO and head of Trust & Safety each stop, each the chief privateness and compliance officers out of the blue departed, alongside different high executives inside the corporate.
And what’s Twitter’s new proprietor doing?
Elon Musk is scaring off advertisers along with his weird behaviour, as selections he made allowed pranksters to impersonate large manufacturers and put up tweets that did untold harm to enterprise’s status and erased billions of {dollars} from their market cap.
We talked about a number of the issues at Twitter a few weeks in the past, on the “Smashimg Security” podcast. Little did we all know that issues have been going to go from dangerous to worse.
The newest screw-up at Twitter? An ill-considered intiative by Musk to rid Twitter of “bloatware” seemingly by chance locked some customers out the location for some time, as SMS-based two-factor authentication was by chance disabled.
It feels like somebody was ordered to tear some code out of Twitter, and so they merely didn’t perceive the complexity of Twitter’s system – the gazillions of dependencies and penalties that simply making one change can have on different components of the location.
The solely folks prone to perceive these hyperlinks and dependencies between Twitter’s methods, and lift a warning of doable penalties, are almost certainly those that Twitter has already fired. If they even have been nonetheless employed by the corporate, likelihood is that Twitter’s new boss wouldn’t take heed to them.
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So, what does this imply for you if you happen to’re a Twitter consumer? Well, I’m a Twitter consumer… and I discover it worrying.
Because though most of what I do on Twitter is public, I’ve additionally had lots non-public direct message (DM) conversations within the nearly 15 years I’ve been a consumer on the location.
I can’t keep in mind all the pieces I’ve mentioned in these conversations, or what folks could have mentioned again to me.
If Twitter is careless sufficient to interrupt how 2FA works for a few of its customers a couple of days in the past, what mistake would possibly they make subsequent? If Twitter’s safety consultants have both been fired, have stop, or – presumably – are questioning the place they need to go subsequent, then simply how protected is my knowledge on Twitter?
It could also be a distant risk that Twitter may have a monumental safety screw-up or endure a hack that it merely doesn’t have the experience to guard towards, however it’s a risk. And it’s a risk that appears extra possible in the present day than earlier than Elon Musk purchased the corporate.
There’s not something I can do to make a chaotic Twitter safer. But I can scale back the potential threat to me, by deleting my DMs.
I don’t want all these previous DM conversations, they are often erased. They ought to be erased.
It’s a laborious course of (Twitter doesn’t provide you with an automatic means of doing it), however I’d relatively delete them one-by-one than someday discover that they’re within the arms of a hacker or a disgruntled Twitter worker who goes rogue.
PS. You know what’s actually galling? Erasing your Twitter DMs doesn’t really cease Twitter from preserving a replica of your non-public messages unbeknownst to you, even if you happen to someday utterly shut your account.
Some last ideas:
- Encourage your Twitter buddies to delete their DMs too, so “both sides” of the dialog are wiped.
- Even if Twitter doesn’t delete them behind-the-scenes, if *your* account is breached the messages shouldn’t be readily accessible by a hacker.
- If Twitter retains your non-public messages even after you’ve requested they’re deleted, is that probably a (expensive) GDPR violation?
- If you wish to hold a everlasting document of your DMs (and your different Twitter exercise) contemplate downloading your Twitter archive.
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