Twitter Settles Privacy Charges
The settlement announced by the FTC on Thursday stems from a series of attacks last year on Twitter, the three-year old phenomenon that lets people send short text messages to groups of followers. Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter is creating an independently audited security program, among other measures.
The FTC said serious lapses in Twitter’s security allowed hackers to send out phony tweets pretending to be from U.S. President Barack Obama and Fox News. Hackers also managed to take administrative control of Twitter and gain access to private tweets, or short text messages of 140 characters or less.
Between January and May 2009, hackers were “able to view nonpublic user information, gain access to direct messages and protected tweets, and reset any user’s password” and send tweets from any user account, according to the FTC complaint.
Twitter acknowledged 45 accounts were accessed by hackers in January last year and 10 in April 2009 “for short periods of time.”
It said the January attack resulted in “unauthorized joke tweets” from nine accounts. The hackers may also have accessed data such as email addresses and phone numbers, the privately held company said.
In the April incident, Twitter said it cut off the hacker’s administrative access within 18 minutes of the attack and quickly informed affected users.
Tags: Administrative Control, barack obama, Email Addresses, Followers, Fox News, Ftc Complaint, Hacker, Information Gain, joke, Lapses, Measures, News Hackers, Phenomenon, Phone Numbers, Security Program, Short Periods, Text Messages, Tweets, twitter, User Information
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