Twitter Urged To Beef Up Encryption 07/20/2020 – MediaPost Communications

Twitter is facing new calls to beef up itssecurity practices, following a widely publicized hack that resulted in account hijackings.

Details about how the hackers gained access to the accounts -- including those of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and President BarackObama -- are still emerging. But at least one potential avenue of attack -- direct messages -- would be more secure if Twitter protected them with end-to-end encryption, according to the digitalrights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

End-to-end encryption provides the robust internal safeguard that Twitter needs, the group writes in a post urging Twitter toimplement the security protocol.

Earlier this week, Twitter fell victim to what it describes as a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of ouremployees with access to internal systems and tools.

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Twitter says it believes that around 130 accounts weretargeted, and that hackers were able to gain control of a small subset of those accounts. The hackers, who asked people to send bitcoin to an anonymous address, reportedly received more than 400 payments, totaling around $121,000.

Direct messagesare vulnerable to this weeks kind of internal compromise, the Electronic Frontier Foundationsays. Thats because they arenotend-to-end encrypted, soTwitter itself has access to them.

The group adds that Twitter wouldnt have to worry about whether or not this weeks attackers read or exfiltrated DMs if it hadend-to-end encrypted them.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) also urged Twitter to encrypt direct messages.

While its still not clear if the hackers gained access toTwitter DMs, this is a vulnerability that has lasted for far too long, Wyden tweeted this week. If hackers gainedaccess to users' DMs, this breach could have a breathtaking impact for years to come.

Separately, New York Attorney General Attorney General Letitia James launched aninvestigation into the hack, which she stated raises serious concerns about datasecurity and how platforms like Twitter could be used to harm public debate.

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Twitter Urged To Beef Up Encryption 07/20/2020 - MediaPost Communications