Twitter Comes of Age (Part 1)

Upfront disclaimer: I am a security researcher for Intel and my work is likely to result in products that Intel will want to sell (not necessarily to you, but to solve your problems). However, this particular blog entry does not address the technical problems as much as it addresses the underlying social issues that drive the problems and contains only minimal concrete suggestions to solutions. I will try to later supplement this with some concrete technological steps one can take, but first I had to address this overwhelming issue that isn’t something a new configuration file parameter could make disappear.

Recently Twitter, Facebook, and several other social media sites came under a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Since that time, twitter has been the victim of a koobface virus attack and implicated as part of the control structure for a bot net. Prior to that there was a mild uproar on twitter about it removing many followers from people, having suspected those followers as "spam" sites. Just prior to that there was a twittergate where many of twitter's internal confidential documents were leaked.

Is this the end of the world for twitter? Not exactly. These are facts of life in the always-on-world-wide-internet-connected-got-to-have-it-now age. In fact, for twitter, they are probably a good sign, a coming of age, a sign that it is worthy of being noticed and has made it onto the malware writers’ radar.

There are also other ways to look at what has happened. We could look at what twitter tells other site managers about what attacks they might expect as they launch internet services and those services become popular. In the future, I hope to explore that topic.

We can also look at what it means to us the general populace as users of twitter, facebook, friendfeed, and other social media sites. That’s what I’ll explore in the next section of this blog article by giving it a historical perspective.

Artwork: The picture of the dead twitter bird is by almisakti from the photobucket.com collection.