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Discussion on: What are the major lessons from the Twitter hack?

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Mike Lockhart

Indeed. Impersonating a user is a common troubleshooting tool used in a lot of web applications. I don't believe this attack (it wasn't a "hack", not even a "crack") was made any worse by the presence of the tools, or their wide-ranging ability.

Usually the mitigation for security risks in such a tool are:

  • auditing of the actions performed by the support engineer on the user's behalf (that is: logging that the actions were done by the engineer, not the account owner themselves)
  • 2FA for the engineering accounts
  • background security checks
  • regular, updated training and refreshers against social engineering attacks

In this case, it appears that the engineer's credentials have been obtained, and that 2FA was ineffectual or not employed. The tool itself may already audit the actions, which might have helped to remove the fake posts quickly, as they would have been recorded as such.