TechCrunch is running one hell of story about confidential Twitter documents landing in their inbox. It’s not pretty, and I can’t help but feel bad for those hacked. An event like this is every geeks worst nightmare, at least it should be. I know it’s mine. As we put more and more sensitive information into the cloud (Google Apps in this case) this is going be a real problem.
So about those docs, Mike is going to publish some of them and likely take a lot of heat for doing so. TechCrunch will exclude anything too confidential (employee information, access codes etc), basically just use good judgement with the material. A lot of people are going to cry foul regardless, but I think you’ll see the released material is nothing earth shattering. If anything, more entertaining than damaging.
Judging by the bravado of this hacker, these docs are getting out one way or another. In fact the whole lot of them will probably circulate in some form. Mike is pushing the envelope here no doubt, and I can’t help but admire that. But really if he can some how stop all these docs from getting broader distribution, he would actually be helping Twitter.
So while we wait to see the docs in question, go grab some popcorn, oh and start deleting those uber sensitive docs from your Google Docs.
Update, are the docs:
July 15th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Let’s learn from this so that we can prevent at least similar hacking.
July 15th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
For the average ready you may want to mention who Mike is that you are referring to.
July 16th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Yeah, the hacker may get the material out there somehow. It would have been a great acid test of which web publishers have any ethics or standards. Obviously, we know where TechCrunch falls. I’ll never return.
July 16th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
@Aafter Search: Using passwords other than “password” might help for starters.
November 29th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
[...] on July 15th, 2009Share A substantial security breach at Google Apps was reported yesterday by TechCrunch and confirmed by Twitter: hundreds of confidential corporate documents of Twitter and Twitter [...]