If you haven’t yet heard about the Twitter hack, you probably haven’t been on Twitter. Or the Web. Or watched the news. It’s been all over the past couple of days so I didn’t really feel the need to cover it here. That said, when Senator Ron Wyden says something, it suddenly has immediate relevance for folks. And he commented today on how the lack of encryption on Twitter DMs could mean that those messages were accessed from compromised accounts.
Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator, said in a statement that in a private meeting in 2018, Twitter’s chief executive Jack Dorsey said the company “was working on end-to-end encrypted direct messages,” a kind of encryption that would prevent even Twitter from reading users’ messages.
“It has been nearly two years since our meeting, and Twitter DMs are still not encrypted, leaving them vulnerable to employees who abuse their internal access to the company’s systems, and hackers who gain unauthorized access,” said Wyden. “While it still isn’t clear if the hackers behind yesterday’s incident gained access to Twitter direct messages, this is a vulnerability that has lasted for far too long, and one that is not present in other, competing platforms.”
“If hackers gained access to users’ DMs, this breach could have a breathtaking impact, for years to come,” the lawmaker said.
For more, read “Twitter won’t say if hackers accessed user DMs after breach” on TechCrunch.
