The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack

Like other successful attacks, Hacker Croll used the same combination of patience, sheer determination and somewhat elementary methods to gain access to a frightening number of accounts and services related to Twitter and Twitter employees. The list of services affected either directly, or indirectly, are some of the most popular web applications in use today - Gmail, Google Apps, MobileMe, AT&T, Amazon, Hotmail, Paypal and iTunes . Taken individually, most of these services have reasonable security precautions against intrusion. But there are huge weaknesses when they are looked at together, as an ecosystem. Like dominoes, once one fell (Gmail was the first to go), the others all tumbled as well.