Twitter to revamp security in light of server hack
In light of a massive breach of Twitter servers, the social networking company is planning on giving its security a massive shot of steroids.
In light of the recent Twitter hack, the social networking site has announced all intentions to beef up its security and put in place a two-factor authentication system, according to a new job posting put in place on behalf of the site.
A few days ago Twitter had announced that it had detected a breach in its system. Since it could not ascertain the extent of the breach, Twitter has gone ahead and reset the acocunts of the 250,000 users along with revoking all security tokens. However, some users are reporting being able to access their Twitter accounts via third party apps with their old password, meaning that Twitter has not revoked the OAuth tokens.
Twitter is taking this breach quite seriously as a new job posting for a a new worker to increase security by implementing two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication will make it nearly impossible for hackers to gain access to accounts even if they know the password. Two-factor authentication involves the use of at least two forms of authentication (from three) such as a password, a physical token of sorts and biometrics.
Obviously, while this would be a serious beefing up of security, one can’t help but wonder how Twitter would go about implementing this. While a password is something universal, will Twitter be issuing physical authentication tokens to each one of its users or will they instead employ biometric? It is important to note that not every user has access to a fingerprint scanner or a webcam on their machine.
While Twitter might not implement this new measure for all users, it could do so for corporate and celebtrity accounts on a paid basis, or just make this feature available to anyone who chooses to pay for it. Regardless of how Twitter implements this, it is nice to see someone taking security seriously.