Let’s get Koobfaced The latest rash of compromised accounts on Twitter follows similar attacks on Facebook and other social media sites. The culprit could be a variant of the changeling Koobface, which is turning into quite a menace by the looks of it.
We’ll see more of the same in the future, because access to audiences in the millions is simply irresistible for spammers and their malware making mates.
That’s bad enough, but the situation isn’t helped by “experts” being quoted in media explaining what’s going without actually understanding any of it.
It’s not very likely that Twitter accounts were cracked with brute force, through assembling username lists and then running a password guesser against those. For starters, it would take way too long, even if Twitter didn’t have any method of detecting huge numbers of failed log on attempts.
Second, hacking the “Twitter mainframe” or “back-end” sounds wow, complete cybercrime like, but that’s really quite unlikely to have happened in this case.
Third, Twitter’s “openness” as in having an open API is neither here nor there as far as security is concerned. The accounts weren’t compromised via the API.
Fourth, in this case, changing the password isn’t likely to help if you have Koobface on board your computer, ravaging your browser cookies. A good anti-virus scanner might though.
What the attack points to instead is a bunch of fundamental design flaws in the intarweb and its associated devices and software. It would be better to talk some more about that instead of trotting out bad and faulty advice to people whose trust you seek as part of your business model.
Roboneill’s Rotorua rampage The editorial fifty-foot Roboneill seems to have had an interesting time at the Rural Broadband Symposium in Rotorua this week, judging by the wodge of copy produced from there.
What was said at the RBS seems like common sense: the biggest export earner in New Zealand needs to improve its productivity, and for that it needs fast broadband connections. That’s not surprising really, but the fact that it’s almost 2010 and our rural cousins don’t have much to choose from when it comes to network connections should be a major concern to everyone.
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