This essay explores the recent security breach by that occurred to the Associated Press. The AP's Twitter account password was comprised and as a result a disruptive disinformation tweet was released. The breach itself is discussed and recommendations are offered as how to prevent this type of hacker attack from happening in the future.
Twitter Breach
As technology and humans continue to learn how to act with one another, many valuable lessons can be learned from this process. Today, the internet and the rapid connectivity that this piece of technology allows, has solved many old problems but has created many new issues as well. The purpose of this essay is to describe and detail a data breach that has occurred recently. Specifically, this writing will describe the details of the Associated Press'(AP) recent Twitter hack that caused a national panic. This essay will examine the AP and its business model before looking at the specific information that was stolen. Additionally the breach itself will be broken down to help understand how this breach happened and how it may be prevented in the future.
The AP is a long trusted and well respected news outlet that sets the pace for the news cycles of the day. It is therefore extremely important that AP's product is based on fact and dictates the actual truth. Recently the AP's Twitter account was hacked in late April 2013. A false tweet was issued from an unknown source and the content of the information caused a chain of events that witnessed temporary panic and anxiety throughout the media and news industry.
Greenfield (2013) detailed this attack in her article that exposed a large and looming threat to any organization or business that conducts operations on the internet. The tweet stated "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured." As a result " the stock market took an instant nose dive and made just as instant recovery in response to the alarming tweet from the AP account to its hundreds and thousands of followers."
In this case the sensitive information stolen was actually disinformation. Here the hackers used trickery and deception to alter stock markets and cause panic. The true gain of this ploy has not been discovered as of yet and demonstrates the vulnerability of news media which threatens the veracity of what can be accepted from institutional sources. The AP's role is to provide accurate information to help keep the masses up-to-date on issues that are essential, and when this ideal is tampered with, the system begins to breakdown and chaos may ensue.
The breach itself remains mysterious and there are not any definitive theories that have approached a complete breakdown of how this breach occurred. Ngak (2013) proposed that "A hacking group going by the name of the Syrian Electric Army has claimed that they are responsible for the breaches. Typically, the hackers spread political messages and misinformation."
No real concrete data has been gathered about this group and has not been confirmed as well. Either way, he blames Twitter and its password systems for many of these hacking problems. He continued "Twitter's lack of two-step authentication. Verified accounts -- those belonging to famous people or organizations to which Twitter adds a check mark because of the volume of parody accounts -- are particularly in need of this. As we saw from Tuesday's event, just one tweet can affect global financial markets."
Most importantly, the question remains how did this happen? The AP's Twitter account represents the breach point of this operation and all investigations must begin at that point. Specifically, passwords can be cracked by many different methods and the need for a back up authorization barrier seems that it may have prevented this security breach.
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